COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.–The Air Force is pursuing a concept it calls multi-domain operations that seeks to tear down stovepipes and share command and control (C2) data across operations centers.
Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) Gen. John Hyten said Tuesday the multi-domain operations concept was developed in the last year and has become a very important discussion point in the Air Force. Hyten said multi-domain operations are part of the Pentagon’s third offset strategy as the strategy seeks to improve the “kill chain” by integrating humans and machines in a better way, by passing information from machine-to-machine (m2m) and have the human in the right place, at the right time, to make the right decision.
Hyten showed a video here at the 32nd Space Symposium of warfighters across the joint force working together to execute an air strike. Warfighters voiced commands to each other to execute their task. Hyten said the communications in the video were seamless and everything seemed to work together properly.
But Hyten said what was wrong in the video was that almost every order was communicated by voice. The request for support was by voice, the target was passed via voice and the coordinates were passed via voice, he said. Though Hyten said Air Force operational C2 centers do their individual responsibilities well in air, space and cyber, he said they exist in stovepipes, as they share voice communications, but not data.
“In the not too distance future, when we can share data back and forth between those operations centers, that’s when we’ll achieve the vision of multi-domain operations,” Hyten said.
Hyten said multi-domain operations were born out of his frustration with cross-domain operations, which he believed meant asking the space or cyber airmen if they could do something. Multi-domain operations, he said, are about achieving a desired effect regardless of where it comes from or on what platform.
“I’m going to go use that and create the effect I need on the battlefield, I’m going to create it right now and I don’t care where the effect comes from,” Hyten said. “That’s fundamentally different from what we do today.”
A Lockheed Martin [LMT] official said the company has a significant number of simulation and visualization tools that can be used to fill the Air Force’s need for multi-domain operations. Wendy Collision, director of the Air Force command and control division at Lockheed Martin, told Defense Daily Wednesday the company is developing a space-to-air solution set and that she is scheduled to brief an Air Force senior leader in Washington next week on a potential solution.
Collison said one of the biggest problems the Air Force has is getting the data, bringing it into an integrated C2 system and being able to distribute the command decision. Distributed C2 is something they’ll also be talking about, she said.