By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
Tanks, missiles, stealth fighter jets, warships and aircraft carriers are going nowhere soon, as any potential future conflict will likely require the weapons delivery “hammer” to destroy and bring “effects” on a target for victory in armed conflict.
Yet beneath the surface of this well known and seemingly obvious reality, there is a fast-emerging new dimension to modern warfare which is expected to define which military force may prevail in a future battlefield. Information itself, while long valued in the world of intelligence and warfare, has hit paradigm-changing levels of importance when it comes to speed, targeting, data organization and information transmission.
In a general sense, this is not knew, as former Col. John Boyd OODA Loop concept was made famous and endures to this day. The difference is domain, volume, format and speed. Boyd Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action (OODA) cycle describing the importance of completing a targeting or attack decision cycle inside of or “ahead” of an enemy decided victory in a dogfight. In terms of basic conceptual premise, the same is true across armed conflict, meaning whichever force can see, target and destroy and enemy “faster,” “quicker,” and “before” an enemy …. prevails.
Information is the WEAPON of WAR
The basic conceptual apparatus informing concepts of operation is arguably somewhat unchanged, what is different is the range, speed, scope and transmission of data. What may have at one time been an idea to describe the process of an individual fighter against another in air combat is now a tactical approach across all domains and branches of the military. It is the premise of the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control effort, which seeks to identify, organize, translate and “transmit” time-sensitive combat information across a joint multi-domain force.
As the Pentagon now builds upon years of progress to accelerate its Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) program through its new Implementation Plan, each of the contributing US military services are drawing upon years of developmental effort. The Army, Navy and Air Force have been pursuing joint, multi-domain connectivity for nearly decades, both as individual services and a joint force.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon unveiled its JADC2 Implementation Plan, which continues to make progress integrating the Navy’s Project Overmatch with the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System and the Army’s Project Convergence.
“This step represents irreversible momentum toward implementing the JADC2 Strategy and concepts the Department announced earlier this year,” said Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Warrior in a written statement earlier this year. “This is about dramatically increasing the speed of information sharing and decision making in a contested environment to ensure we can quickly bring to bear all our capabilities to address specific threats.”
All services have been breakthrough with this kind of high-speed data analysis and transmission to “shorten” the sensor to shooter loop and find and destroy enemies faster and before they can be seen or targeted. The Army’s project convergence, for instance, demonstrated years ago that it was able to shorten the sensor-to-shooter curve from 20 minutes down to 20 seconds using AI-enabled computing and a multi-domain mesh of networked combat nodes involving mini drones, large drones, helicopters, satellites, ground control stations and even fighter jets. Air Ground coordination using Army ground units and US Marine Corps F-35Bs were able to synergize information processing and transmission to share targeting specifics and optimize and coordinate attacks.
“You’ve heard a lot of talk across the department about JADC2. The Deputy Secretary of Defense is eager to make sure that we’re pushing forward in the right way. It’s a combination of a couple of different areas. First, it’s making sure that each service understands their contribution to JADC2 capability as part of a joint force, and the Army is eager to support that,” Gabe Camarillo, Under Secretary of the Army, told Warrior in an interview earlier this year.
One critical technical element of this, according to senior Army weapons developers, can be generally referred to as “gateways,” essentially a technological infrastructure sufficient to aggregate, organize, analyze and “translate” incoming sensor data from otherwise disparate transport layers. Perhaps one targeting system arrives through an RF signal with yet another from an EO/IR sensor and a third from satellite GPS? How can these otherwise disaggregated pools of incoming combat data can be “translated” and analyzed in relation to one another to create an integrated intelligence picture of the battlefield.
“With data coming in from multiple sources in multiple formats, the quick win is to have translators to take that data and translate it to another format that is useable for whatever application you are operating in,” William Nelson, Deputy, Army Futures Command, recently told Warrior in an interview.
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University
