F-35 Will Get Data to Special Ops Forces at Machine Speed

Video Above: F-35 

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

The Air Force is working with the Army to get F-35 data to ground-operating Special Operations Forces, Marines and Infantry at “machine speed,” by virtue of leveraging key emerging technologies able to quickly transmit time sensitive data from point-to-point in real time without having to first go through a command and control center.

“We are going to get F-35 data to a SOF team at machine speed. We are on a road to make sure that the Army is inside of the F-35 and sharing data instantaneously to take advantage of what the aircraft is seeing and sensing,” Lt. Gen. David Nahom, Deputy Air Force Chief of Staff, Plans and Programs, told The Mtichell Institute for Aerospace studies in a recent interview.

F-35 Data to Warfighters

The goal is to send F-35 data “directly” without having to first route it through a centralized command and control structure to “empower warfighters at the edge of combat” with an ability to collect, process and analyze data in order to make fast, war-crucial decisions at the point of attack. This of course reduces latency and massively expedites sensor-to-shooter time but also increases data security as sensitive targeting details will not need to travel as far to as many points as has been the case before.

Much of this is slated for the Army’s upcoming Project Convergence program, a combat assessment and exercise slated to take place in the Arizona desert at Yuma Proving Grounds later this year. 

Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2)

Last year, Marine Corps F-35Bs succeeded in sending crucial targeting data to Army ground troops in a demonstration that was regarded as a major breakthrough. There is more of that planned for this year, as each service wants to contribute substantially to the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort designed to generate an interconnected “meshed” network of information nodes dispersed throughout an area of operations.