Project Convergence Capstone 5, hosted by the Army, is an experimentation venue for all the U.S. military services and key allies to train alongside each other and test concepts for integration. This is in line with one of the Pentagon’s top priorities called Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

This year’s event will expand upon previous iterations, taking place in two scenarios: one in March at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, focused on enabling operations at the corps and below level along with joint and international partners, and the other in April along with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to exercise at the combatant command level with all service components.

The Indo-Pacific portion will be much more expansive than what the military did as part of last year’s Project Convergence capstone event.

“Last year, I said we had fake Guam, we had a simulation built that we had something we were defending and all the things that went along with it. This year, we’re taking all that stuff we did in tents at Camp Pendleton [in California] and we’re going to the Pacific. We’ll be operating out of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Japan and Australia,” Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, commander of Joint Modernization Command, said in an interview. “We’ll be doing the same type of things, but it’ll be at actual operational distances across the International Date Line, using the actual live networks. We’ll have all the live intelligence data, plus the simulation wrap that we put on it to do all the key activities, defense of Guam, offensive and defensive activities, etc.”

Miller said the Pacific portion is focused on transitioning from crisis to conflict — using a familiar real-world scenario of defending of U.S. and coalition territory, a nod to China’s ambitions to take Taiwan — involving theater-level offensive activity, such as strikes on maritime targets and land targets, while forces are continuing to try to gain intelligence and information about the enemy and defend themselves from adversary volleys.

At Fort Irwin, the exercise will be focused on more tactical operations that go beyond the day-one portion of conflict at the theater level once land, air, sea and special ops forces are introduced. This could be a Pacific or European scenario, Miller noted, as the technology the military is testing will be agnostic to theater.

As part of the exercise, there will be what Miller described as “leave behind” capabilities.

“When we’re done with this … everything from cross-combatant command coordination to target effector pairing at lower echelons, they will have capabilities they will keep that they will be able to fight with on the Indo-Pacom warfighting network. That’s a big deal,” Miller said.

Those leave-behind capabilities fall into two broad categories. The first is related to the minimum viable CJADC2 product that deals with cross-combatant command coordination and collaboration. This is focused on how forces make rapid decisions and understand resources across all the combatant commands in conjunction with the Joint Staff and senior policymakers in the nation’s capital.

This coordination across combat commands is another key difference in this year’s Project Convergence. It’s not just Indo-Pacom, but there will be a total of six combatant commands that are at some point touching the exercise. Officials recognize that a war in one combatant command’s area of responsibility will likely have global implications.

Those collaboration tools span around six or seven workflows, Miller said, which include the Maven Smart System as well as asset visibility and intelligence. There are also machine learning models that are built-in to help provide coordination and situational awareness across the various geographic regions.

The capability provides “the connective tissue so that we don’t have, when something happens, four different combatant commands producing PowerPoint presentations about what their recommendations are, that then the Joint Staff or somebody else has to somehow try to put together,” Miller said. “That’s a time-consuming process and the information gets stale in a hurry.”

The second set of capabilities is focused on the ability to conduct offensive actions from across all the services and coalition partners using any sensor available.

Most importantly, this capability is looking at how to strike heavily protected formations and targets.

“We have to understand, again, what are the totality of the effects we need? Some of it is we need this types of missiles or we this types of subsurface things,” Miller said. “Another part of it is things like how do we bring an enemy out of [emissions control] so we can make sure we know where they are for sure, [and] how we fuse different forms of intelligence rapidly.”

Officials are using the actual maritime strike concept from Indo-Pacom for the scenario.

Army objectives

When it comes to testing out Army-specific objectives for Project Convergence, Miller said the entire basis for the event is built around the forthcoming Army warfighting concept. The event will be based on a much more coherent scenario for how senior leaders think the Army will fight in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe.

Miller outlined four primary warfighting notions they’ll seek to explore during Capstone 5. The first is expanded maneuver aimed at how the joint force is thinking about time and space in all domains. Second is cross-domain fires, involving how to shoot and create effects across all domains of warfare. Third is formation-based layered protection, which is the idea of how to protect units in all domains, such as the electromagnetic spectrum, dispersion of command posts and countering unmanned aerial systems. Last is command and control and counter-C2, or preventing the adversary from being able to command their forces.

To test this out, the Army is looking at a battlefield framework that goes from corps all the way down to the platoon level.

The initiative will provide a unique opportunity to test an operational concept at the corps level in ways the Army typically hasn’t before.

Corps exercises are traditionally done at the command post level and are simulated. However, Project Convergence is providing a holistic training opportunity at all echelons similar to a combat training center rotation. Those events are typically focused on brigades and are the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train. Project Convergence will essentially be a combat training center rotation for corps and below as opposed to last year’s event, which saw independent pockets of experimentation — such as medical — separate from other operations.

The Army will also be looking at how to do maneuver in a multi-dimensional aspect, to include within the electromagnetic spectrum.

While the Army can’t replicate all these dimensions and capabilities at the National Training Center, it has built a robust simulation environment intended to overwhelm participants with what they might expect during large-scale combat against a sophisticated nation-state adversary.

“If you’re in a command post, what you’re going to have in front of you is a very, very detailed, hectic, confusing picture of what is going on in the air and on the ground for any friendly and enemy UAS systems. Everybody’s trying to jam everybody else. One-way attack munitions. All the same time we’re trying to fire rockets and cannons through that space. We’re trying to fly manned [and] unmanned rotary-wing aircraft. We’re trying to resupply. All of the stuff that has to happen to do an operation,” Miller said. “How we think about planning and operating in that space is huge. We have technologies that are brought in to help us make sense of all that. We’re very focused on making sure commanders and staffs understand what they look like in the electromagnetic spectrum and what their vulnerabilities are [and] at the same time what the enemy’s vulnerabilities are. That’s a big focus.”

They’ll also be focusing on robotics and human-robot formations, particularly for breaching, to ensure human soldiers aren’t the first forces in contact with the adversary.

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Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance.

“Because the bandwidth that’s available in these pLEO satellite connections to our ground control stations is so big, we’re talking hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth with negligible latency, it makes things possible that you couldn’t do anymore. You don’t need to be persistently connected anymore,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Marine Air Control Group 38, said during a webcast Monday hosted by C4ISRNET, adding that this also includes the cloud.

In the past, U.S. troops were used to constant connectivity to higher headquarters or to pass data back and forth. Now, they will have to operate somewhat disconnected at times, but these new technologies are providing more bandwidth in those scenarios.

“pLEO is a game changer … That high amount of bandwidth and that low latency really changes what’s possible on modern networks,” Quinter told DefenseScoop in an Oct. 7 interview. “Because the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, you have significantly less latency than you typically would. What that means is it makes certain things possible that wouldn’t [otherwise] be possible.”

These constellations provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes. Now, troops can have up to 200 megabytes or more depending on how much officials are willing to spend, allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.

Those constellations are also more resilient given there are more smaller satellites in orbit as opposed to a lower number of exquisite, geosynchronous orbit satellite communications architectures.

“Some of our senior leaders used to refer to those [military satellite constellations] as big, juicy targets for anti-satellite ballistic missiles. With the proliferation of these smaller, flat sats in lower orbit, orders of magnitude — four, five, six — and there’s plans for there to be 10-12,000 of these satellites in lower orbit, there’s inherent survivability in that constellation, just from the sheer numbers,” Quinter said in the webcast.

Those connections, however, are easier to jam, and officials have always been careful to warn that their access must factor into what the military describes as a PACE plan — or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency — depending on the operation.

But the enhanced connectivity those constellations provide will allow forces to operate more dispersed and disconnected on the battlefield, a key tenet as observations from current conflicts indicate static units will be much more vulnerable.

“Once you have that kind of bandwidth, you don’t need to be persistently connected. You could establish a hybrid cloud network,” Quinter said.

Quinter served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix. He noted that during that process, officials used to say the critical requirement to enable that concept is cloud.

Key to realizing that goal is the DOD’s enterprise cloud contract vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders. Officials in the past have indicated how important this vehicle is to the CJADC2 concept and enabling connectivity and interoperability of forces across the globe.

“We are working with companies … through their cloud environment and trying to establish that hybrid cloud architecture at the edge of the network, which could persist without a connection over pLEO. You could turn that satellite connection on and off as necessary to be more survivable,” Quinter said.

He noted that as long as units have enough processing power and storage at the edge, they don’t need to be constantly connected. They just need to be able to process the information in the field.

“I say ‘hybrid cloud’ because it needs to be both private and public, like we need to be taking advantage of the prime contractors that are on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract,” he said. “Those will enable us to leverage [a] big data center when we are connected to the enterprise. But we also need to have the hardware at the edge of our network that can handle cloud, hybrid cloud at the edge.”

Quinter noted that the entire DOD is looking at how to get forces to operate more persistently disconnected. He likened a future scenario to submarines that are usually disconnected, but they surface when they need to, download the necessary data and dive back down to resume their patrols.

“We learned that as communicators, that we need to have a PACE plan. You hear other folks from other communities talking a lot more about that now, but I would say that with the technology that’s available right now, you could essentially operate in a no probability to detect, no probability of intercept environment, because hybrid cloud will enable you to do many, many things on the edge of a network that you typically, at least historically, have not been able to do,” Quinter said.

This notion will require a paradigm shift and change in thinking for many service members that have been used to being constantly connected.

“One thing that I have noticed over the last two years in particular, [is] that we have a lot of teaching and educating that we need to do across the force when it comes to cloud,” he said. “I think there’s not enough people that understand how that technology works in particular, which puts us at a disadvantage, because as we’re designing these circuits to install, operate, maintain them in the network in a combat environment, we need to know what’s in the realm possible. I think cloud is not something with that we’re teaching in the schoolhouse yet, but we’re getting there.”

There is a bit of a misconception among many, Quinter added, given cloud is associated with large data centers.

“When people think about cloud, they think about data centers, like back in [the continental U.S.]. In their mind, I think it’s a natural default for most people to think, ‘Well, if I’m not connected to the data center, then how am I using the cloud?’” he said. “That’s what I meant by the level of education that’s required, even across the comm community, for people to understand what is and is not possible when it comes to cloud.”

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The announcement comes three years after Space Systems Command (SSC) awarded Sev1Tech a $46.5 million pathfinder contract to develop a prototype of the capability — known as meshONE-T — at 17 locations around the world. Under the follow-on agreement, Sev1Tech will now scale the terrestrial network over 85 fixed sites and enhance its capabilities “with 24/7/365 managed transport services and enterprise-wide upgrades,” according to an SSC news release.

MeshONE-T is a ground-based architecture that serves as a “data-transport-as-a-service” for other customers within the Defense Department, Col. Peter Mastro, senior materiel leader for the tactical command, control and communication delta within SSC’s battle management command, control and communications (BMC3) program executive office, previously told DefenseScoop.

“You can buy into what we have, and in doing so you join an integrated network,” Mastro said during a meeting with reporters in April. “When you join the meshONE network — and even if you just get one node at your location — you now are connected to every other node in the mesh network.”

The network of data transport nodes allows different programs and military services to securely share data with one another, breaking down antiquated technical and procedural barriers in order to enable interoperability.

Specifically, meshONE-T is ideal for moving large capacity, big bandwidth and high-performance data over long distances, according to the Space Force.

The capability is one of the service’s key efforts related to the Pentagon-wide effort initiative known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which seeks to deploy technologies that connect platforms and weapons from all the services and key foreign partners under a single network to provide faster and more effective decision-making.

Since Sev1Tech began prototyping meshONE-T in 2021, the capability has supported a number of programs for the DAF Battle Network — the Department of the Air Force contribution to CJADC2. Demonstrations have been done for the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and the cloud-based command and control capability (CBC2), as well as the Space Force’s Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) program for missile warning and tracking.

Along with adding dozens of new sites, the follow-on contract will also allow the Space Force to enhance meshONE-T’s overall capability. Mastro previously said those improvements would include connecting the network to commercial and military-specific satellite communications networks in low-Earth orbit.

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The effort is associated with Combined Joint-All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

To date, each U.S. military service has built its own systems and capabilities — which in many cases don’t even talk to themselves within their respective service — creating integration challenges at the joint level. Ultimately, capabilities must come together at the four-star, joint combatant command level where that commander integrates each service capability to determine which is the best available to execute the mission.

While the Pentagon has been undertaking a years-long initiative that involves the patchwork effort of stitching and retrofitting old systems together, it’s looking to set data standards going forward to ensure systems at the very least are compatible and somewhat interoperable.

“I always argue that for us to have CJADC2 success, each of us in the military departments, we have to worry about ensuring that the data that is most relevant to the joint force is trusted, verifiable and accessible to the joint force,” Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army, said at NDIA’s Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition last week.

“My goal as undersecretary of the Army is I’ve got to make sure that [data] it exists within an architecture that can be tapped into, whether it’s a joint task force supporting a [combatant command] commander, or whether it’s an operational commander in the Army at the two-star level division commander who has a very specific theater-level need. And understanding how to scale access to that data is really important,” he added.

Centrally within DOD, some are looking to create more standardized architectures.

“Data is the key to JADC2 … that realization of decoupling applications from the underlying data is what will allow network scaling to occur,” John Waterston, chief engineer for the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s Advanced Command and Control Accelerator, said at the conference.

That organization, Waterston said, matured from a CJADC2 tiger team within CDAO and grew into the accelerator.

One effort underway at that office is to create an architecture for others — including government agencies — to enter their data in. It’s called Open DAGIR — short for Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories — and it seeks to provide an ecosystem to integrate tools and platforms.

“That is one of the biggest issues, is sharing data across both, again, cross-domain and across application stacks. We need to be better about that,” Garrett Berntsen, deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for mission analytics in CDAO, said at the conference, noting that sometimes policy issues — not technical ones — can be the biggest hurdle.

“What we think needs to come along with that concept is an architecture where, as I said, there is not one infrastructure to rule them all, but we have the right standards across IL, impact levels, across software applications where people are using the same standards and are interoperable to share data,” Bernsten said. “The Open DAGIR concept is there to help us attack each of those pieces.”

Officials have noted that no single contractor has the answer, and thus democratizing information and capability development is important.

“No one company has all of the innovation in CJADC2,” Waterston said. “The key is, how do we make the government-owned data — we all acknowledge that warfighting data is wholly government-owned — we don’t want to be stuck in individual stovepipes and we want to maximize the value of that.”

He noted that Open DAGIR will provide an exchange for modern application programming interfaces and API-based information between systems that can help build a web of interconnections.

“What we don’t want to do is say we’ve only built one tool and that’s the only tool and no one’s allowed to use a different tool … Maybe at a data integration layer, we need to have more coordination, but we want to also incentivize democratization of capabilities,” Berntsen said. “Services have their own unique needs. Below the services, teams need access to this data. And we actually think that we’ll have better outcomes if we unlock access to this data and let them build and develop under a certain set of guidelines and standards of course.”

One of the first efforts Open DAGIR is working is building a metadata catalog for warfighting data with the vision of allowing combatant commanders to ask where they can find a particular piece of information.

Creating these standards is also important to ensure that as new systems are built in the future, interoperability isn’t sacrificed for new vendors — an issue that was prevalent in the past.

“We need the standards defined so that as new technology comes out, we’re not beholden to the same winner,” Lt. Gen. Richard Coffman, deputy commanding general of Army Futures Command, said at the conference.

This will allow the military to integrate new technology into systems they hadn’t conceived of when the system was first procured.

“We don’t care what’s in the black box. We want you to adhere to our security standards, adhere to our interface standard, much like a USB port. If I get a new sensor, I can put it on a vehicle and I will have to pay for it once,” he added. “That’s where we’re trying to go and I think we’re more than willing to pick any company that can get us there, as long as we’re not beholden to them forever.”

Hand-in-hand with standardization of data is ensuring the lessons, tactics, tools, architectures and capabilities are being shared across theaters. While other similar efforts to JADC2 have been attempted many times in the past, they were either still too siloed by service or theater. In order for the concept to work, systems and forces must be integrated across theaters — given the trans-regional threats many adversaries pose — and forces must all be operating from the same playbook.

“We have to remember that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force are providers of capability. The common standards that you’re looking for reside in the [combatant commands] themselves. If I need to send half of a division to [Indo-Pacific Command] and half a division to Europe, those standards should be the same or else it’s going to take you a very long time to get everything safe,” Coffman said. “The combat commands are working together to understand that. Most of them are using the same software, if not all of them.”

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Valiant Shield, which occurred in mid-June, is a biennial exercise focused on integration between the services in a multi-domain environment in the Pacific region. This year’s exercise, the tenth such event, involved multinational partners for the first time. It allowed American forces and foreign militaries — including participation from U.S. Space Command and U.S. Transportation Command — to focus on real-world events while testing concepts such as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster.

“Valiant Shield gave us a great opportunity for us to work as a joint force to conduct command and control of joint forces and joint capabilities from multiple axes, across multiple domains and integrating in allies and partners down to the tactical level,” Rear Adm. Joaquin J. Martinez de Pinillos, vice commander of 7th Fleet, said in an interview. “We really had a great opportunity to really work things both at the operational level and all the way down to the tactical level and work through both the communications, command and control, how do we share information, how do we all see the same battlespace? All those things across the joint force, which are not easy to do, we were able to exercise with great success during Valiant Shield.”

Martinez de Pinillos was not able to offer many specifics on the exercise, such as what was tested or the scenarios due to classification and sensitivities, but did note that broadly, they sought for higher headquarters — specifically the joint task force commander — to pass instructions, coordinate and synchronize joint effects from their level down to tactical units across all domains.

The key challenge they sought to address was getting all units across the joint force to be able to have the same battlefield picture and synchronize effects in space and time faster than the adversary. In fact, they conducted a series of tactical engagements in simulated environments and a live fire to demonstrate that they were able to clearly understand what the joint task force commander had in mind and then show him on the field what it would look like and how they can bring all those capabilities together.

“The things I think that we have to do is if you take a look at Ukraine and you see some of the things that the Houthis [are doing in the Middle East] and all of that, I think what you’re seeing is a speed of warfare that is incredibly fast. I think the thing that we’re going to continue to work on is just our ability to just rapidly plan faster than the enemy can, faster than they can react to us, so that we’re always causing dilemmas for the enemy as we go forward,” he explained. “I think that speed that we’re going to get with these systems, because it gives us an ability to communicate so effectively across the joint force, we’re going to continue to work on that.”

Command and control

At the heart of being able to act faster than the adversary is the ability to conduct command and control: being able to sense the environment and deliver the necessary effects against a target in the right domain by the right system operated by the right military service or international partner.

This is challenging currently as each service operates its own siloed systems that don’t necessarily plug into or talk to other systems from other services — or in some cases, its own service — much less international partners.

In a future fight, a four-star combatant commander in charge of conducting warfare and coordinating effects over an entire region must be able to pick the right capabilities based on the target set. In order to do that effectively and at the speed of conflict, they must have the ability to see each service’s capabilities and coordinate them efficiently, which is at the heart of CJADC2.

“What we were working on the JFN and the CJADC2 is, we want to make sure that everybody has that same operational picture of the battlefield,” Martinez de Pinillos said, describing the Joint Fires Network, a prototyping effort serving as a battle management platform and displaying real-time, fused, actionable threat information to joint and partner forces.

Valiant Shield was the first test of the initial prototype, which will allow geographically dispersed commanders to simultaneously plan and execute with a shared common understanding of the battlespace based on sensors from any platform to provide targeting guidance to any weapon systems, according to Lockheed Martin.

“Everybody understands, when I say the words ‘track 1,2,3,’ that that is track 1,2,3 and that is the exact same thing that everybody understands the track 1,2,3,” he added. “Sounds like a very simple thing, but it is actually a very complicated thing to actually do in execution. That’s an example of something we were able to do.”

To help test these concepts for command and control and interoperability, several defense contractors participated in Valiant Shield bringing their capabilities to play in the exercise.

“For us, the Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the JADC2 objective is fundamentally to integrate stovepiped legacy systems into a digital environment that provides a mission engine that allows for a comprehensive understanding of command and control across any domain, any service, any network,” Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said in an interview.

He said they provided capabilities for the joint force to detect, locate, track and engage across domains in response to a variety of different missions geographically deployed across the Indo-Pacom region. They provided software and hardware to help warfighters ingest data at scale, do correlation of data, provide a common operating picture and then do machine-to-machine tasking.

Anduril brought its Lattice capability to the exercise, it’s software fabric that serves as a command-and-control platform ingesting data that can then automate C2 functions resulting in a scalable battle network. The company also brought its Menace family of systems, a command and control as well as compute and communications capability.

Keane noted that Menace provided communications to support denied, degraded, intermittent and limited connectivity (DDIL), which U.S. forces will face increasingly against sophisticated adversaries that will seek to deny friendly forces.

“As you think about any large operating area, especially Indo-Pacom, supporting understanding and being able to operate in denied and degraded connectivity scenarios, is incredibly valuable,” he said.

Software company Palantir also contributed to the exercise. And while it was limited in what it could say, the company noted it provided capabilities to track and engage with targets.

“Palantir software was deployed in part to help deliver the end-to-end joint force capability of detecting, locating, tracking, and engaging units across domains and mission areas. More specifically, Palantir’s software served as the digital foundation for a common data picture that enabled users from all echelons to communicate on the same basis,” Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir Technologies, said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

“The Indo-Pacific is a uniquely complex operational environment where the software systems that give America its deterrent and defensive edge must be deployed in extreme conditions. These denied, disrupted, and limited environments are precisely the conditions that industry providers build for, and it is why we actively participate in exercises like Valiant Shield — both to ensure the defense community is proficient in the advanced technologies at their disposal, and to ensure that our software solutions are tailored to meet real-world mission needs,” Clark added.

Coordinating and shifting fires

Once targets are identified, command-and-control capabilities must assist in coordinating what service or platform will actually fire upon the target, another key pillar of CJADC2.

During the exercise, planners experimented shifting fires to different commanders and services, Martinez de Pinillos said.

“Sometimes the fires would be led by the Army, and sometimes it’d be led by the Navy, and sometimes they would be led by the Marine Corps, and sometimes they’d be led by the Air Force,” he said. “We demonstrated resiliency and flexibility in our ability to shift command and control around as the problem evolved and as the conditions in the environment and the battlefield drove us that way.”

This was also demonstrated across multiple domains, synchronizing fires from subsurface, surface, into the air and space, he added.

“That allows us to do some very, very complex operations, which is something that we practice at very hard because we know as a joint force, that is the only way that we’re going to engage in combat,” he said. “Having everybody inside that JFN single network on their own systems that they’re used to working with, but then being able to link in to that Joint Fires Network so that we’re all kind of dealing with the same piece of paper, in a virtual sense, and we’re all working off at the same piece — I think was a big piece of that and really helped us coordinate and synchronize as a joint force.”

For its part, Lockheed Martin provided live theater-level operational planning for Valiant Shield, it said in a release.

“The exercise showcased the seamless integration of Lockheed Martin’s advanced command and control functions, employing Operational Planning to coordinate real-time decision-making across the theater of operations, with all the Services and operational domains. This approach enhanced the agility and responsiveness of joint operations, using live real-time data, and producing joint tasking orders in an operationally relevant environment,” the company said.

Martinez de Pinillos explained that Valiant Shield demonstrated the ability of the joint force to understand what each other’s capabilities were.

“I think all that information sharing that was going on and how we were able to rapidly communicate that through tools like JFN, through tools like Maven [Smart System], those things really helped bring and synchronize that together because everybody was working off the same sheet of paper and working together as a team and really able to maximize their contribution, because it was easy to understand what the capabilities and limitations were of whatever piece of the puzzle that they brought to it,” he said. “That allowed us to very rapidly and seamlessly bring those things together so that we were able to commensurate those effects very, very rapidly.”

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The so-called “sprint week” is scheduled for Sept. 9-13 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will address human-machine teaming capabilities that can help battle managers make faster and better-informed decisions when engaging with targets, according to a request for information posted to Sam.gov on Thursday.

The event will support the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) effort, which is the Air Force’s contribution to the Pentagon-wide initiative known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

CJADC2 is an approach to warfighting that aims to enable data to move more effectively across distributed networks of sensors and weapons, allowing military leaders to quickly ingest information about incoming threats from multiple sources and take informed actions to defeat them. The various networks would be connected by faster communications, processing and decision-making systems supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. 

AFRL’s upcoming sprint will focus on “Generating BattleCOAs” — one of the specific ABMS subfunctions that largely “explain the comprehensive set of battlespace information elements and decisions [a human-machine team] must make to battle manage the battlespace,” according to the RFI.

Specifically, it involves determining what existing weapons systems and effects would be needed to support battle managers in operations, effectively creating various courses of action that represent the steps, weapons and other tools that are needed to eliminate a threat. The RFI noted that this process currently involves numerous personnel and very little human-machine teaming capabilities.

“To win against a peer adversary, the joint force must achieve decision advantage by equipping human-machine teams with automation to sort through complex and high-volume battle management decisions with faster tempo and improved decision quality,” the document states.

During the first three days of the planned sprint week, invited participants will be able to quickly iterate and refine their human-machine teaming solutions against the Generating BattleCOAs problem set. The final two days will allow Air Force operators to test the refined solutions in a series of experiments.

“The goal is to compare decision performance against a baseline and provide measurable changes in decision performance of the human-machine team,” the RFI noted.

Experiments during the event will address a series of considerations outlined by AFRL — including how fast the capabilities can make decisions; how accurate and error-free those decisions are; how confident human operators are in the human-machine teaming solution; and can the service measure utility, cost and risk with a Generating BattleCOAs “instance.”

Vendors interested in participating must reply to the RFI by Aug. 9.

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The Joint Staff stood up an AI task force in February, comprised of staff members from across the entire organization. And recently it completed a 90-day sprint to examine use cases for artificial intelligence applications, as well as long-term organizational structures needed within the Joint Staff for sustaining AI-enabled capabilities, according to Lt. Gen. Todd Isaacson, director for the Joint Staff’s J-6 Command, Control, Communications, Computers, & Cyber bureau.

As a result, the organization now wants its own in-house chief digital and artificial intelligence office, Isaacson said Thursday during a keynote speech at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference.

“Currently we have a [chief data officer] and I serve as the [chief information officer], but we’re looking at ways to reorganize the Joint Staff to get after what I think is some open field running and a real opportunity for us to continue to evolve,” Isaacson said. “This was inward looking at the Joint Staff. As you might imagine, the outcomes were very, very promising.”

While he did not share any information regarding when the Joint Staff might try to stand up a CDAO, the intent represents a trend happening across the Pentagon regarding AI. The entire department is exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies can be used for military applications — including day-to-day administration tasks, data management assistance and operations. 

The Joint Staff’s AI task force also conducted an internal review where they assessed the workflows of all eight directorates, analyzing them “in a decomposed state,” Isaacson said. The goal was to understand where existing AI-enabled capabilities from the commercial sector could be used to streamline the organization’s processes, he noted.

That also includes generative AI technology, he said. The subfield of artificial intelligence uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on.

“What we found in that 90-day sprint was we had more use cases than we could actually get after. So, we were super excited about that outcome,” Isaacson said.

The Joint Staff is on a larger path to improve modernization of both its own organization and the entire U.S. military — an effort spearheaded by Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown. Brown has directed the J-6 to take the lead on many of those efforts, and the directorate has recently established a campaign plan for digital modernization, Isaacson said.

He noted the effort is focused on four areas: developing, maintaining and attracting a digitally enabled workforce; improving the Pentagon’s networking infrastructure; acquiring advanced tools and capabilities; and rapid adoption of new technologies.

“One of the things that the department doesn’t do well is rapidly adopting, but we’re doing it better than we used to and we’re continuing to endeavor to make it better as we partner with our industry partners,” Isaacson noted.

He also said that the J-6 is constantly taking insights from the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE).

Hosted by the Defense Department’s CDAO, the experiments are held in conjunction with combatant command exercises and are designed to test new capabilities for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). The warfighting construct is designed to move data across distributed networks of sensors and weapons connected by faster communication, processing and decision layers informed by AI and ML.

“As we conduct those experiments, what we have found is that data integration — the tagging, the labeling, the exposure, the availability — is a key component to achieving the dominance in the information space that we described,” Isaacson noted. “Experimentation and demonstrations are at the center of everything that your joint force is doing as it relates to digital modernization.”

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Project Convergence Capstone 4, as it is called, is taking place in two phases: Phase 1 occurred at Camp Pendleton from Feb. 23-March 3 and was joint-focused, integrating offensive and defensive fires as well as defeating a large target array. Phase 2 will occur at Fort Irwin March 11-20 and will be more Army-focused. Project Convergence is hosted by the Army and provides an experimentation venue for the joint services and multinational partners to test capabilities and concepts associated with the Pentagon’s top priority called Combined Joint All-Domain and Control (CJADC2).

CJADC2 envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked and connected to provide the right data to commanders for better and faster decision-making.

“The entire joint force, and with our U.K. and Australian teammates and allies, we were able to effectively move data for the first time in an Indo-Pacific scenario at a magnitude never seen before,” Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman, deputy commander of Army Futures Command, told reporters during a visit to Project Convergence March 5. Coffman noted it was ten times what the experiment resulted in a year ago.

Officials noted that this isn’t an end state. Project Convergence is a continuous experimentation effort that ties into several exercises across the Pacific and European theater, gaming concepts and technologies for greater connectivity to enable faster decision-making.

The experiment simulated the vast distance of the Pacific by having participation from Australia all the way back to the continental U.S. as far as New Jersey, with water simulated in the continental U.S. There were forces, capabilities and threat forces playing from Australia, Hawaii, Joint Base Lewis McChord, Camp Pendleton, Nevada test range and Nellis Air Force Base, Fort Irwin and White Sands Missile Range.

Phase 2 will involve a complete battle handoff of data from XVIII Airborne Corps at Camp Pendleton to III Corps at Fort Irwin. This means the Army will test sharing and sending data from one corps to another to continue operations.

Officials were sparse on specific details regarding what types of data were passed, aside from general targeting information, or how that data was passed. However, many officials noted the key to Capstone 4 was being able to pass data quickly.

“The aim point really for all of capstone experimentation is to be able to pass information from the edge to the decider, whoever that decider is, wherever that C2 node is located … and then to the effector at machine speed, reducing transcription times, or, for instance, type in or copy and paste or answer the phone to pass that message,” said Maj. John Donaho, capability integrator team leader at Joint Modernization Command.

He went on to explain that the legacy way of doing things involved phone or radio calls that would bounce around from various units to headquarters and back delaying the time to affect a target.

The goal is to get to what Donaho called “joint integrated sensor netting,” essentially where sensors can talk to each other, allowing humans to understand the information and pass it seamlessly to the right unit or capability best positioned to take action. For example, that could be ships sharing information with an aircraft that then shares that information with land-based capabilities.

“Every service developed programs that support service requirements and that’s how it works. The Navy is going to solve Navy problems, the Army is going to solve Army problems,” he said. “However, 21st-century conflict is a team sport. It’s not just a Navy problem, it’s not just an Army problem, it’s not just a U.S. military problem. It’s a combined and joint problem working through not just our joint partners, but also our allies and mission partners to accomplish a shared and state.”

In one portion of the scenario, special operations forces, who inserted themselves within the enemy battlespace as is their key role in helping shape operations for the joint force, were able to pass data back to the combined joint task force to issue tactical fire direction.

In a fires example, Col. Matthew Rauscher, director of Fires Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate at Fort Sill, explained that the passage of data was the objective of the experiment, not the time it took from identifying a target to firing.

“For us, the experiment really was from the point of sense to passing the data to the effector. That was what we were really focused on [with] this,” he said.

Elsewhere, officials described how BEAST+ — a small backpack-based system for direction-finding targeting, with an electronic attack capability added on, if needed – successfully relayed electronic signals from soldiers on the ground at White Sands Missile Range to the command center at Camp Pendleton for them to take action against. This was a big milestone for those teams to be able to find signals of interest and transmit them to higher headquarters to better understand the electromagnetic spectrum environment and, if needed, allow more advanced time for reprogrammers to make adjustments to those signals of interest.

Officials described a series of cross-domain solutions and bridging capabilities that enabled data to pass from the sensors of one service to another, or even to an international partner.

However, in many cases, those cross-domain solutions had to be tweaked throughout the experiment.

“Our cross-domain solutions, in some cases, were not optimal and had to be reprogrammed to work. At the end, we were able to work through these glitches and ensure that we can pass data across the coalition and across the joint force. But when you put stress on untested equipment, you’re going to learn things,” Coffman said. “What we learned very quickly is that when you’re passing that volume of data, there’s other legacy systems that weren’t designed initially for that amount. We have to open those up, and we’re able to do that. But you just don’t know what parts and what software needs to be modified to take that volume of data. Initially, that gave us some trouble and then we were able to work through it.”

Coffman described a bridging capability that enabled the passage of defensive information data to everyone on the network.

“This bridge absolutely allowed us to pass information from multiple sensors to multiple shooters so that an Army sensor passed data to a shooter in every service and every service sensor passed the same to every other service,” he explained. “It was able to pass an amount of data that we have not seen before. We tested it last year, it was nascent, and we were able to pass data successfully. But now by increasing 10-fold, it absolutely was able to pass that data and get it to the right shooters.”

When it came to the network itself, officials said it responded well and was impressive.

What “used to take us days and hours is just taking us minutes now, to put those things and make them work together, which has been really, really impressive to watch,” said Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Network Cross Functional Team, adding that this is the third Project Convergence he’s participated in.

Col. Heather Fisk, who served as the Capstone 4 G6, explained that participants saw increased ability to get information from a sensor to a decider to a shooter at faster speeds.

“We’ve been experimenting with some technologies that enable us to do that at machine speed and it has increased our ability to do Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control and situational awareness synchronization with our multinational partners,” Fisk said. “We’ve seen these technologies improve how we can share our common operational picture, synchronize with our joint and multinational partners and also share not just our common operational picture, but our common intelligence picture as well.”

Essence of CJADC2

Officials explained that developing a joint and multinational common operational picture – one that allows everyone to have the same picture of the battlefield with the same data – will make executing operations more efficient, especially from a munitions perspective.

“Without experiments like this, when a threat arises, the Marine Corps would shoot at it, the Navy would shoot at it and now we have three missiles … the Air Force is firing, now we have four. With this, with that common operational picture, we’ve identified the ones so we don’t waste missiles needlessly and we’re all shooting at the same target,” Coffman said.

Others described the end state as a single magazine.

“What Convergence allows is … us to operate with one single magazine across the joint force. If we can’t connect ourselves together, then we’re going to build individual stovepipe plans and we may end up double-targeting or triple-targeting as we each build a plan that sits on top or next to one another,” said Vice Adm. Michael Boyle, commander of Third Fleet. “But if we can connect together, then we can draw from a single magazine across the joint force … We don’t have unlimited magazines.”

Boyle noted that while it’s not the operational force’s or the exercise’s role to fill the magazines, it is their job to “ensure that we can connect my sensors to his fires and his sensors to my fires because I might have the most available weapon where he’s got the most survivable sensor and vice versa.”

“That’s really what this is about: It’s enabling us to pick from whatever magazine we would need to pick from,” he added.

Getting from experiment to real-world operations

Project Convergence aims to experiment with new technologies and concepts, which ultimately inform potential requirements for systems to be deployed. Officials described how the experiment sought to help inform those approaches and even make their way into real-world operations and units after successful demonstration.

“I view Convergence as the opportunity to test that the lightning bolts are possible. Lightning bolts on slides where we see collectors connected to effectors or the collection assets connected to the fires elements that are going to deliver effects to our adversaries,” Boyle said.

He noted that as the Third Fleet commander, with responsibility for naval forces in the Pacific, he brought real, actual platforms and capabilities to Project Convergence, namely the USS Paul Hamilton, USS Momsen, USS Savannah, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes and EP-3s.

This was done, Boyle said, to “put some real live program of record assets and demonstrate that we can connect that capability to the experimentation that’s happening across the joint force and connect it to other program of record capability. That gives me the confidence as an operational commander, that if asked to synchronize these joint effects I could.”

The experiment also allowed teams to practice mission rehearsal with planners present.

“The planners that were also here executing this experiment can say, ‘I know this can be done. I saw it done during Convergence. Let’s figure out what part of that machine has to be turned into a program of record so that I can put it on my watch floor and execute during those mission rehearsals,’ which then gives me that fight-tonight capability using the joint force,” Boyle said. “What I’m really describing is requirements generation, so then, as an operator, I now know that it’s possible. I know it’s not theoretical, it’s possible. Then I can very clearly define I need to have the capability that was demonstrated during Convergence.”

The lessons from Project Convergence will be brought forward to the next Pacific exercise and Europe exercise so they are continuously improved, Coffman said.

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Published in the past year, the Information Environment Ecosystem Blueprint, developed by the Navy’s office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, documents the reference architecture to move from a host of interconnected systems to a capability platform model.

“With our information ecosystem blueprint, we’ve we have highlighted that reference model that we want to align to, so that we can seamlessly employ from our ashore and our afloat-based platforms,” Jennifer Edgin, assistant deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare (N2N6B), said Thursday at the annual WEST conference.

Edgin has experience developing blueprints for modernization, having been behind the Marine Corps Information Environment Enterprise — a blueprint serving as a unified technical, physical and business model to document the design of the Marine Corps Information Environment.

“In prior experiences with the Marine Corps and then coming to the Navy side, when you talk to the sailors, when you talk to the providers, you can see there’s some slight disconnects … You hear sailors tried to make two systems talk to each other or doing swivel chair operations to share data. We can do better,” she told DefenseScoop in an interview at the conference. “The idea of the blueprint was really born out of that user frustration. It’s really provided us an opportunity to get really right with our vision of the future.”

The blueprint also helps break down language barriers between technical folks and the actual users.

Edgin equated the need for the blueprint to guide modernization to any construction project trying to build or remodel something.

“Let me ask the audience this: How many of you have ever remodeled a bathroom, built a house, by a show of hands? Yeah, everybody … Did you just hire framers, plumbers, roofers, tile folks and say, ‘Come in and do the job?’ No. That’s a really costly way to do business. It’s also not all that effective,” she said at the conference.

So too is the case for the Navy as it seeks to improve the way its systems are architected with the ultimate goal of improving communications and data flows for a distributed force to sense and make decisions faster than the adversary.

Edgin told DefenseScoop that the blueprint applies to both new systems and architectures as well as existing systems and networks.

“If we look at the platform-centered Navy, we have big capital investments in ships and submarines and aircraft and also our ashore-based facilities. This isn’t a new blueprint for a new house, this is a blueprint for the update and remodel,” she said. “That requires us to take a fresh look at some programs, maybe invest in some new things, but also bring some of our existing things up to date.”

The plan is an iterative process that will eventually be updated, likely in the next 18 months or so.

The first iteration hones in on a few priority areas. The first is zero trust and discerning what the zero-trust principle means for the entire ecosystem.

The next is baking in cybersecurity upfront in systems rather than bolting it on after.

Additionally, Edgin said they wanted to move away from system-centered thinking to capability and services-centered thinking.

Moreover, the blueprint will help the Navy understand what it needs, and in many cases, more importantly, what it doesn’t.

“We’re using our blueprint to continue to unite our capabilities and we’re constantly using it to assess our business and mission value. Oftentimes, we can get enamored with technology,” she said. “We’re really great at identifying technology. We’re really bad at divesting of old things and switching things out. This blueprint is helping us create a comprehensive business and mission model leading to what we hope will be a set of return on investment metrics. This is our long-term journey.”

The plan also will help develop a common type language or architecture with the Department of Defense, other services and even partner nations in line with the Pentagon’s top modernization effort dubbed Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

That plan essentially envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and partners are networked and connected to provide the right data to commanders for better and faster decision-making. The “C” refers to the importance of integrating international partners from the beginning of that plan as well.

“One of the things that the blueprint is, it’s a reference architecture. In the department, we’re really good at solutions architecture and really microsystems architecture. Then we kind of try to piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle,” Edgin told DefenseScoop. “What the blueprint does is say, ‘Okay, here’s how it all comes together’ and then that from there, we can derive specific solutions and systems architectures. Where this comes in from something like CJADC2, they also have a reference architecture. So we can pull up alongside the side [of] those efforts, whether it be CJADC2, an ally or a partner or another service and say, ‘Okay, this is what we look like, this is how we’re aligned to use technology to support our mission threads. How do you look?’”

Ultimately, the plan takes the Navy — and the U.S. military writ large — from trying to make one system talk to another, up to the next level to achieve true integration, she added.

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While there have been experiments and technologies that the Navy has been using for years to demonstrate these types of updates, frequent deliveries only came about fairly recently.

“We did demos years ago where we were able to show them certainly it’s possible. But in terms of doing it as a matter of course, that’s come in the last probably a year-and-a-half or so,” Rear Adm. Douglas Small, commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said Wednesday at the annual WEST conference, adding that ships can be in port or be connected via a satellite link to receive updates.

“We made tremendous headway. The ability to deliver updates, software over the air — you can imagine the amount of change that had to go on from the entire value chain and how you deliver capability. There’s been a lot of really good work on that. Still more to go,” he said.

Small leads the Navy’s tight-lipped Project Overmatch effort, which seeks to connect the fleet and enable forces to operate in a distributed manner. That endeavor falls in line with the Pentagon’s number one priority to connect networks, data, platforms, sensors and shooters across the joint forces in order to make faster and more informed decisions than adversaries. The concept is known as Joint All-Domian Command and Control (JADC2).

Project Overmatch is a key initiative for Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, who sees it as an opportunity to gain advantages and think differently about how to integrate disruptive and emerging technologies to adapt to changes in warfare.

“Through Project Overmatch, we’re building a software-defined network solution and modern software pipelines to provide as many pathways as is possible to connect and share information. This initiative is an effort to transmit any data over any network and is the connective tissue between today’s fleet and tomorrow’s emerging hybrid fleet,” she said Tuesday at the conference. “In using that connectivity, we’re working to evolve Aegis and the ship self-defense system into a single, hardware-agnostic software suite, like the integrated combat system, that all ships can pull from to conduct missions alone or in a group. This system will enable a surface action group, a strike group and a fleet, or any combination of integrated combat system-equipped ships to operate as a single, seamless system and become a true system of systems.”

Carrier Strike Group 1 and its flagship, the USS Carl Vinson, was one of the first to begin receiving Overmatch capabilities last year, serving as a test bed to experiment with accelerating the scaling of these technologies.

Since then, the Navy has equipped additional strike groups with Overmatch capabilities.

“We did a lot of testing on fielding of systems on Vinson. Vinson is deployed with our capabilities. We certainly have moved on and fielded out additional strike groups. It’s never something that we’re done with. It’s a constant learning and a constant improving process,” Small said. “What’s neat about the way we’re delivering our tools, software and things is that we can take in direct feedback and make the updates in stride with the fleet. Not only have we fielded, we’ve updated and re-fielded and delivered — over the air — capabilities based on what it is that the sailors need. It’s a constant learning, growing, getting better, updating our own systems, updating our own pipelines for how we field, how we do cybersecurity.”

To support the effort, the Navy’s information warfare entity is seeking to bolster its training to match the tempo and intensity of updates.

“We’re working across all the other type commanders, we’re working across all the other warfighting development centers, [Carrier Strike Group 4 and Carrier Strike Group 15] to really integrate Overmatch into the [Optimized Fleet Response Plan] on the fleet side,” Elizabeth Nashold, deputy commander of Naval Information Forces, said at the conference. “We have had to think about training differently, like when we’re delivering capabilities quickly to the fleet, our standard processes don’t work as well. We’re doing a lot of learning through that journey.”

Nashold later told reporters that officials need to speed the cycle of getting capability to the fleet and training sailors on it. Moving from inception to delivery takes a long time as the process must go through several steps such a requirements approval, acquisition and training.

“With Overmatch we’re looking at a speed to capability delivery to the fleet. If you’re talking about capability to the fleet faster, then the training has to be faster, too,” she said. “That’s why with training, that’s why we are asking for — it’s very important for us to have a point of presence training. Where can we have training delivered to where the sailors are? Where can we have virtual training environments? Where can we have the representative representation of the equipment [that] may be in the cloud for operators to use and become proficient on? That’s where we need to go is making that cycle faster.”

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