The Defense Department needs to step back and narrow its initial efforts to develop capabilities for a more interconnected battlespace and focus on the key ingredient to make Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) a reality and that is ensuring there is more bandwidth available, a top Republican congressman said on Wednesday.
The Link 16 data link network is too narrow and the data pipe must be widened to accommodate the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting data that will enable CJADC2, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said during a fireside chat hosted by the Hudson Institute.
“The concept of CJADC2 is great…and we need that, but it’s an area where the concept is ahead of where we need to be to enable that,” Wittman said during the conversation, which was moderated by Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. Later in the conversation, Wittman said “Let’s make sure we have a pipeline to just do a good job and gathering targeting information, and then we can figure out how to get targeting information to different places.”
Of CJADC2, Clark said, “Obviously, it hasn’t gone swimmingly, they haven’t yielded a lot of output,” and asked Wittman what the key enablers are to help the effort.
In addition to the need for greater bandwidth for data to circulate among sensors, shooters, and command and control operators, Wittman said more duplication of capabilities is necessary to enable a wider data pipe. The “first thing our adversaries” will do is attempt to knock out how various systems are connected in the battlespace.
Wittman said the U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR) needs to be put on “steroids.”
CASR is a framework to leverage commercial capabilities through pre-negotiated contracts that would be used during crisis or conflict, complementing government-owned systems, and enhancing the capacity and resilience of the national security space architecture.
The U.S. needs as many commercial satellites as possible in various orbits “to have bandwidth preserved for the United States military so that way we have layering and that way too we have enough pipe to be able to move information around,” Wittman said.
Interoperability is also a challenge, especially with legacy systems, he said.
The Defense Department in late May took a significant step forward in its CJADC2 efforts when it awarded Palantir Technologies [PLTR] a potential $480 million contract to begin production of the Maven Smart System (MSS), an operations platform that integrates sensor and data inputs at a single workstation to provide friendly and adversary force dispositions and potential targets and then make decisions based on that information (Defense Daily, May 30).
Wittman also plugged the HASC’s proposal for a Drone Corps within the Army to centralize and speed the service’s efforts to get small drones, and the capabilities to defeat an enemy’s drone, into tactical units. The Army has pushed back on this proposal, arguing it would create too much specialization and slow efforts to deploy new capabilities as they emerge.
Wittman agrees with Army’s plan that soldiers should develop the requirements and operational concepts for the use of drones and counter-drone systems, but that said gathering this feedback within the current structure will take too long.
“So, the question is, then, how do you acquire it in mass in a timely way?” Wittman said. “There needs to be some entity there that says, ‘Okay, we’re taking all this data in and we believe the best combination of that is to do this combination of things and we can get it out there and they can do…80 percent of what the operators want it to do, instead of starting with the apple and giving them a pineapple.’”
A centralized entity like the Drone Corps will cut through the typical experimentation efforts the military services do with different systems and technologies but fail to result in acquiring systems in mass, Wittman said. The Drone Corps will bring together the requirements and operating concepts developed by the users and then decide to “operationalize this,” he said. “Now this is how we can bring this to scale quickly.”
U.S. Special Operations Command, which has acquisition authorities, is already acquiring capabilities it needs quickly as part of their “nature,” Wittman said. “The question for us should become, ‘Why is that the exception? Why shouldn’t it be the rule?’”