Focusing on Accelerators: JADC2

Greg Wenzel, Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton offer insights and reflections on JADC2 2022.

Today’s adversaries are waging a new kind of war that requires the united force of the U.S. and its allies to win. The Russian GRU has destabilized Ukraine with cyber attacks on its infrastructure and satellite systems. Meanwhile, Chinese intelligence services conduct ongoing information warfare against American economy and culture. In response, the Department of Defense (DOD) must make faster progress toward one integrated, digitally-powered force.

The Urgency of Achieving JADC2 JADC2—the Department of Defense’s (DOD) initiative to connect U.S. forces into a single network—is the path forward for U.S. security. JADC2 will combine and analyze data so critical intelligence can flow securely from sensors to warfighters and command and control. For the first time, the U.S. and its allies will be empowered to act as one force.

It’s an ambitious goal and a complex initiative. Past attempts to connect across services have had limited success, primarily due to cultural challenges that prevented true cross-service interoperability.

Meeting at National Defense University to Explore the Way Ahead

With these stakes in mind, DOD leaders and industry partners met at National Defense University (NDU) on April 18 to discuss JADC2. By educating future national security leaders, NDU helps shape U.S. defense. This event allowed students to discuss critical challenges with top military leaders. Sponsored by Booz Allen in partnership with National Defense University Foundation, the gathering brought leaders together to discuss JADC2’s key challenges, cultural barriers, and technical considerations— including resilient networking, data fabrics, and agile command and control.

Below are the top five themes from the event.

1. Industry partnership is critical to make JADC2 a reality. The appearance of SpaceX, Google, and Booz Allen panelists onstage with top DOD leaders demonstrated the new era of defense—industry partnerships to accelerate groundbreaking victories. Military leaders recognize that industry partners are agile. They experiment with new technology, take risks, and offer wide talent pools that DOD needs to respond to adversarial threats and connect the joint force.

2. DOD must transition its approach from network-centric to data-centric. A central theme across panels was that data centricity is a key to setting JADC2 apart from past attempts to connect the forces. Leaders such as Dr. David Honey, Maj. Gen. Robert Collins and Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey discussed the cultural challenges that have prevented data sharing across networks. Each service has its own structure and historically has focused on solutions within each network, making it challenging to align systems. A new datacentric approach enables data sharing across networks, regardless of mission alignment.

3. The joint force needs a unified data fabric. A unified data fabric is a vital enabler of the transition from a network-centric to a datacentric environment. Panelists noted that data across DOD is challenging to discover and share due to siloed development. A data fabric holds promise to overcome monolithic silos, making existing data accessible to every partner. Margaret Palmieri, DOD’s Deputy Chief Digital and A.I. Intelligence Officer, emphasized the importance of a federated data fabric and ecosystem backed by common organizational data standards that guide accessing and calling up metadata.

4. Human-machine teaming is essential to winning at the speed of battle. Panelists spoke to the need for an algorithmic warfare strategy that infuses our weapons and systems with artificial intelligence

(A.I.) to give our joint force the ultimate advantage. A.I. is critical to connecting and strengthening sensors, enhancing cybersecurity, and detecting real-time threats. Whether helping soldiers at the edge determine a course of action or acting as the first line of defense against adversarial attacks in self-healing networks, leaders and industry partners agreed that A.I. and machine learning capabilities will play a critical role in determining the outcome of current and future conflicts.

5. DOD must build with zero trust security. Every panelist emphasized that zero trust security controls are a vital accelerator to information sharing in the JADC2 vision. Zero trust uses identity control and access management (ICAM) and A.I. to enable secure, agile data exchange across joint forces. Instead of traditional cross-domain security controls, it relies on a technologyagnostic approach that requires users to verify their identity within a system continuously. Zero trust is critical for a mission partner environment, where data must be securely and rapidly transmitted to allies and international coalition partners.

Gregory Wenzel, Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton, is a leader in Booz Allen’s global defense business driving next-generation technologies through the firm’s Digital Battlespace business. His primary focus is to help the Army transform and modernize by bringing the best digital, analytic, cyber, and engineering services and solutions available to our warfighters.