If his nomination is confirmed, he’ll pin on his third star and take charge of the new organization.

Cropsey has been leading the Department of the Air Force’s command, control, communications and battle management program executive office for the last two years, serving as the point person for DAF efforts related to the Pentagon’s top priority for how it will fight in the future: Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). That effort envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the U.S. military services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster.

The new Information Dominance Systems Center was created as part of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s so-called re-optimization for great power competition initiative, announced in February, that seeks several reforms and reorganizations to better posture the service to combat an advancing China.

The Air Force, much like the rest of the armed services, is still emerging from over 20 years of counterterror operations in the Middle East against a technologically inferior enemy. The advent of great power competition against more sophisticated actors such as Russia and China will require large shifts in organizations and capabilities.

The new center, which will be housed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, will sit under Air Force Materiel Command and serve to elevate the service’s focus on C3BM to include specific disciplines of cyber, electronic warfare, information systems and enterprise digital infrastructure.  

Four program executive offices will realign from the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center to the new Information Dominance Systems Center to include C3BM, cyber and networks, electronic systems and business enterprise systems.

Moreover, the new three-star commander will also be dual-hatted as the Department of the Air Force’s command, control, communications and battle management program director.

Cropsey is primed to come to the new leadership role having served as the point person for the C3BM office, a position that Kendall has previously described as the “most difficult job I have ever given anybody.” In that capacity, he’s been responsible for developing the DAF Battle Network and combining several initiatives — to include the Advanced Battle Management System — for a more streamlined CJADC2 type of solution, by taking smaller, bite-sized chunks at a time in pursuit of transformation.

In September, the Air Force announced that it, through the C3BM office, was selected as the executive agent for Indo-Pacific Command’s Joint Fires Network, a prototyping effort that served as a battle management platform displaying real-time, fused, actionable threat information to joint and partner forces.

Cropsey’s nomination must be confirmed by the Senate.

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In the middle of establishing a Marine Air Traffic Control Mobile Team, the small unit was forced into defensive positions to protect its area. As the old adage goes: Every Marine a rifleman.

Fending off three “red cells,” the unit was able to defend its area and successfully establish communications for those in the Aviation Ground Support Operation Center who perform combat engineering, logistical support and airfield operations.

In a future operating environment, such as the island chains in the Pacific, smaller, more dispersed units will be tasked with defending their areas while establishing communications nodes to enable operations for the air wing.

Such was the scenario at the Lightning Strike, an exercise that took place in October at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar that sought to test the communications squadron in Marine Air Control Group 38’s ability to establish 15 communications nodes, as opposed to the eight nodes they were responsible for in the past – in addition to meeting the mission-essential tasks of the unit.

Much like the rest of the military, the Marine Corps is evolving the way it operates as part of an overall shift from 20 years of counterinsurgency operations to so-called great power competition. The National Defense Strategy names China as the “pacing threat,” and with that, the armed forces must alter how they are structured to counter a sophisticated military in a complicated region that is dominated by vast seas, enormous distances and numerous islands.

As part of the Marine Corps’ Force Design and its commandant’s planning guidance efforts, the Corps’ wings are shifting from mostly static bases to launch aircraft, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a hub-spoke-node model moving forward. This means forces will be spread out and dispersed across the battlespace, likely on several islands, and as a result, the control group — which is responsible for establishing communications and command and control capabilities for aviation elements in the field — must alter its operating concept to support these dispersed air units as well.

Lightning Strike “also had to be evolving the comm squadron to support the Marine Aircraft Wing, based off the way the Marine Aircraft Wing is being employed in support of Force Design 2030. If the wing is now being employed more for a hub, spoke and node model, and more distributed, then the comm squadron has to be able to do that as well,” Lt. Col. Brian Kerg, commander of Marine Wing Comm Squadron 38, said in an interview.

Officials explained that Lightning Strike was a way for the unit to signal to the commandant that it understood the planning guidance and force design.

The exercise sought to examine, with current programs of record and tables of equipment, if the comm squadron could support the communications the wing demands. Many of the legacy programs of record are not only clunky to drag around the battlefield — such as VSAT Larges that are vehicle-towed — but also can take a while to set up, tear down, establish communications and have limited throughput. As part of the exercises, forces were given several pieces of commercial off-the-shelf equipment to augment the programs of record that are not only more mobile but have several orders of magnitude more throughput, such as Starshield and Kymeta terminals, and also provide diversity of transport, a key tenet for future warfare if systems are jammed or blocked by the enemy.

“The way [the comm squadron’s] table of organization and equipment was written was not for that type of employment concept,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Control Group 38, said in an interview, regarding the legacy model for deploying. “What the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Kerg, is trying to figure out is: Do they have enough capacity to support the entire wing? … They’re spread out in 15 separate locations right now and they’re maxing out their equipment and their people to see if they can pull that off.”

Quinter believes the right mix of capabilities won’t necessarily be a major issue. Instead, he’s concerned with capacity, especially given the unit won’t be given more personnel but will be spread out more to establish 15 nodes, which means smaller units in the field.

“I’m pretty confident they have the right capability. Capacity is probably going to be the more important question … do they have enough people? Is the squadron big enough to be able to do that? I don’t know what the answer will be,” he said.

Testing comms Marines

The 2024 iteration marked the second of Lightning Strike, albeit a significantly larger one. Officials noted this year’s event was a slow build-up throughout the two weeks, described as a crawl, walk, run format.

Marines began the initial stages of the exercise using primarily legacy communications systems and adding more advanced systems including the commercial capabilities as the event progressed.

“That’s kind of the scenario that we painted was we didn’t have the Starshields and the COTS terminals in the first three days. We got up on services, we became [fully operational], and then we could tie in the COTS — both teaching the communicators how to do the old method but also the new method at the same time,” said Capt. Dakota Newsome, operations and executive officer for Bravo Company in Comm Squadron 38. “As we progress too, we realize that we need to have more throughput at some of these smaller sites. We used to send maybe single-channel radio out on some of these sites and that’s how they would have the feedback. But now, since we have these COTS terminals that we can start dropping and start enabling that NIPR, SIPR services at the lowest warfighter, like at the edge, like those edge devices can actually C2 back all the way to the” Tactical Air Command Center.

The various organizations throughout the exercise begin at the largest, most static — the Marine Air Group headquarters — getting more and more austere all the way down to a four-Marine team at the forward arming and refueling points with just a single-channel radio that can provide refuel aircraft in the field.

Establishing the 15 nodes not only provides more diversity of transport and more communications options, but, officials explained, it also allows for more purpose-built comms units.

“It also allows us to send out more nodes that do specific functions,” said Capt. Hipolito Ozuna, S3 alpha operations. “So everyone performs a specific function. What we do is we enable more of those specific functions to be able to be employed through our communication system. We’re able to essentially create more task-purpose nodes throughout” the event.

As part of force design and the changes within the Corps, the service is getting more organized comms platoons. In the past, when they would deploy, a unit wouldn’t necessarily know who they were getting, they just needed bodies and ranks without knowing what those people’s specialties were, officials said.

Now they have actual job titles for the platoons such as SATCOM operator or S6, for example, meaning the units are more task-purposed.

Events such as Lightning Strike allow these communications personnel to practice some of the skills they need to perform where they traditionally might not get many opportunities for such training.

“Our unit usually doesn’t do this type of stuff. In my MOS, for the last couple years, we sit in like a [combat operations center] and just pass basic information. This is a lot more upscale and it’s a lot of good training for my junior Marines. They haven’t gotten this type of training yet, which is good for them, whether it be passing, hey we need this patrol to go out with this bunch of people, rifles, whatever it may be, it’s good for them to be able to get that training now, so in case of a war to break out, we’re able to have them not on their toes, they’re kind of more relaxed and they understand. They’re very calm with the way they pass their traffic,” said Sgt. Brandon Froio, transmission systems operator supervisor. “I like this personally for my juniors because it’s high stress and being able to put them on their toes now, instead of when we’re out there actually in a fight that they’re going to screw up out there, I’d rather them screw up here and get the training they need to be able to go out there and be like, okay this is nothing. I’ve already done this for x amount of times, I got this, this is no problem.”

Another key aspect is the exercise provided an opportunity for Marines to test their military skills, defending their area to set up communications against an opposing force trying to contest them.

“We’re not just teaching the communicators how to communicate, but also how to do those mil skills. Right now, for example, they do have a recon patrol out, there is an enemy patrol en route here and they just got issued an order to actually go interdict that recon patrol. Not just understanding how to communicate, but also like, ‘Hey, there’s an enemy threat out there,’” Newsome said.  

In line with the tenets of force design, the expansion of 15 nodes and smaller teams will help enable the Corps as the so-called “stand-in” force, a vision the Corps has of being the forward presence for the joint force in theater as the eyes and ears. This means that Marines must be more professional and capable in these smaller teams to enable those comms while fighting off the enemy — something Lightning Strike allows them to hone.

‘Game-changing’ equipment

Officials explained that the unit was able to successfully go from eight to 15 nodes providing communications over a geographically dispersed area — seven nodes at Miramar, seven at Camp Pendleton over 30 miles away and a node at the unit’s headquarters.

Such an operational concept will be crucial not just for efforts the Corps has underway, but also for larger efforts spurred on by the Pentagon, such as 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.

“The short version on that is how can the DOD focus on every sensor to every shooter? That’s a great tagline and that’s the desire, that’s the outcome, but that overshadows or overlooks the architecture in the middle that allows every sensor to talk to every shooter, and that’s a big ask. Now you’re looking at Marines like these figuring out how that actually works and not just our communications networks we already have, but tying more sensors into that architecture and add that Marine Air Wing in particular, we have increasingly more and more sensors that allow for aviation command and control and control of aircraft and the content of the functions of marine aviation,” Kerg said. “You have some that are programs of record, you have some that are commercial off-the-shelf and they’re coming at a faster and faster pace and you have some that are experimental.

Kerg continued: “We’re putting an even greater load on the network … If we’re not managing [everything] correctly, then you may get a track, but it might not be target quality or you may not get a track at all. That’s where this all fits in, connecting every sensor to every shooter and our Marines managing the network in an exercise like Lightning Strike is what allows the MAW commander to fight that way … and to be able to support Force Design 2030, which allows us to fit our will with respect to the National Defense Strategy.”

Marine Air Control Group 38 is at the forefront of helping the Corps experiment with CJADC2 concepts, even constructing a CJADC2 lab. In fact, Quinter, who previously served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for CJADC2, wrote the concept paper for Project Dynamis, which ended up being adopted as the Corps’ approach to CJADC2.

“We’ve created our own JADC2 lab and we are experimenting at the speed of funding. Basically, we don’t have extra funding. Essentially, leveraging relationships and the people I’ve met over the last three years since I’ve been working on this and spending a little bit of [operations and maintenance] dollars to get after some stuff,” Quinter said. “Mostly what we’re able to get after are things that are where the Marine Corps is caught up to that particular technology and we’re in a place where headquarters Marine Corps is helping us.”

By utilizing commercial off-the-shelf gear, the units are able to be not only faster and more nimble on the battlefield but also support greater comms capacity, an enabler for the Corps and the joint force.

“We’re taking the latest and greatest in technologies, Starshields and other COTS equipment, and incorporating into the formations to see how we can employ them to become a little more lethal and more capable as a force,” Ozuna said.

Others explained that to establish some of the sites, such as the Marines Aircraft Group headquarters, one of the largest, it initially took almost three days. But with Starshield, they were up in under 12 hours.

Officials have also in the past described capabilities such as proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications – such as Starlink – as game-changing technologies and said it’s possible the results from the exercise could help inform future procurement.

At the end of the exercise, Marine Air Control Group 38 leaders walked away confident that the unit can support the Marine Air Wing commander by providing 15 nodes and closing every sensor to every shooter. They also learned lessons about deploying the squadron as a whole, as opposed to sending detachments forward.

Overall, the forces learned new tactics and operating procedures that will likely be incorporated into operations in the future and used to help shape the next iteration of the exercise.

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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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The U.S. military has been conducting GIDE events for several years, but the pace has picked up recently as Pentagon leaders prioritize capabilities that will enable a warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which seeks to more seamlessly connect the data streams of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners for better and faster decision-making. The department’s Chief Digital and AI Office has been put in charge of the events, which also feature the department’s various combatant commands across the world.

There have been 11 numbered events in the GIDE series so far, which now occur every 90 days or so, and the department is gearing up for the twelfth iteration this fall.

“We are about to announce our inaugural GIDE Challenge in the next week or so. And then we’ll see how many [vendors] we can bring into the enterprise. But we’re really excited to start bringing some new entrants in and to be able to hopefully show them off in GIDE 12,” Col. Matt Strohmeyer, the Pentagon’s director for the Global Information Dominance Experiments, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the Air Defense Summit hosted by the Potomac Officers Club on Tuesday.

He said it’s yet to be determined how many industry partners will be tapped.

“It’s going to be a unique approach, but we’re going to be using the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace to announce it and to kind of manage the process. It is going to focus on contested logistics and contested sustainment. That’s the mission set as part of that version 1.0 of JADC2 workflow that we have for global integration. And so there we’ll be looking for vendors to submit proposals on — or there’ll be a document that’s published that shows them exactly kind of what we’re thinking through, what the workflow is, what the tasks and subtasks we’re looking for them to perform are, whether they try to perform on all of it or perform on a section of it. And then we’ll be looking to try to bring them into an evaluation and then into subsequent GIDE events leading up to GIDE 12,” Strohmeyer explained.

His team is now approaching joint experimentation through multiple venues that build on each other, he noted.

That includes weekly engagements that take place outside the numbered GIDE events.

“We call them GIDE technical workshops where we have the actual software that’s on actual networks with actual users. And we go through a very scoped workflow and we just get quick feedback on what’s working, what’s not working … Those then build into something we call GIDE Xs, which are still scoped, but it’s with several operational users on an operational workflow. And it usually takes place over the course of one-to-two days where we’re now going through a more scaled workflow and process to see what works, what doesn’t work, get feedback from operational users. And then those are on about a monthly basis, and those build into the numbered GIDE events, which that next one is GIDE 12. And that’ll be a several weeks-long event where we really see — did these systems perform the way that we wanted them to?” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

“Our goal, by having that threefold approach, is that we don’t just have a lot of development that happens under the surface and we do an event and then it turns out that the software didn’t exactly meet what we wanted it to. We can get iterative feedback on it as we go through the process better than what we’ve been able to do in the past. And we learned that last year. We used to just do numbered GIDE events, and we learned actually in GIDE 8 last year [that] we need more regular feedback. And that’s when we adopted this new approach,” he added.

The upcoming GIDE events will be held in the wake of the Pentagon’s launch of a new CJADC2-related initiative known as Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR), which aims to scale data analytics and artificial intelligence tools across the department.

“The idea behind Open DAGIR is to allow us … to be able to have a common platform that any vendor can come into that has access to a trove of government data that the government controls, and then we can plug and play vendors as necessary,” Strohmeyer said during a panel discussion at the Air Defense Summit. “We’ve made a pretty significant investment to allow us to be able to do that in the term.”

The Global Information Dominance Experiments will serve as a testbed for vendors’ AI tools and other technologies to determine if they meet military requirements.

One of the strategic objectives of GIDE is to provide a venue for combatant commands, the Joint Staff and coalition partners to exercise their ability to digitally collaborate across the globe on a crisis response decision, Strohmeyer noted.

Another strategic objective is to help the U.S. military and other friendly be better postured to close so-called offensive and defensive kill chains, including through automation.

“We found that the first step is really just getting the data right, getting the workflow right, and then applying some algorithms to it. But then eventually, there’s areas where we think we might be able to apply AI to allow us to be able to smartly — with humans cognizant over the decisions that are being made — allow us to be able to close those kill chains better and faster,” he said.

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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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While the Department of Defense has teams that conduct cyber operations, those joint forces are limited in number and focused on attacking enemy systems and defending the network. As such, the Air Force believes it needs its own cyber capabilities to ensure it can gain and maintain air superiority.

“We have started to make investments in our own service capabilities … not just of course for cybersecurity, or defensive capabilities, but we do believe that at a tactical level we might need a cyber-enabled air superiority type of capability,” Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and cyber effects operations, said during a webcast hosted by Defense One last week. “Air superiority, that’s the function that we absolutely know that the Air Force presents and we think that there’s a tactical cyber capability that we might be able to develop. We’re doing that today in very small numbers, but that is a growth area for sure.”

Lauderback in the past has described the effort as “provid[ing] operationally integrated cyber capabilities to the air component to help assure the projection of air power against the adversary in future operating environments.”

Based upon a series of wargames with the Joint Staff that brought together multiple concepts aimed at informing an integrated future force design, the Air Force determined it needed to develop a new concept and thus validated what it calls cyber-enabled air superiority, according to a service spokesperson.

The concept was built with integration of kinetic and multi-domain operations across planning, targeting and fires as a primary goal, they added, noting it is necessary because advanced threats have forced the service to more closely integrate so-called tactical cyber capabilities to give air components an edge in aircraft survivability and munition effectiveness in highly contested environments where small percentages of positive gain can make the difference between victory and defeat.

Currently, U.S. Cyber Command owns the forces and authorities to conduct operations off DOD networks while each of the services provide those forces. Authorities for cyber ops have been held at the highest levels of government for many years due to fears that such activities could have unintended consequences or spread into networks beyond the intended target.

As the cyber landscape has evolved along with a maturation and understanding of cyber operations in the military and targets that might not be connected to the traditional internet, each of the services have begun investing in capabilities and forces for their own offensive needs. However, this is mostly in the blended electronic warfare or radio frequency-enabled realm at the tactical level.

Each of the services now, in one way or another, are beginning to grow their own organic cyber teams and capabilities separate from Cybercom for tactical or expeditionary cyber operations.

“This doesn’t surprise me at all. This is overdue and it’s a great step forward for the Air Force,” Charles “Tuna” Moore, a retired three-star Air Force general who most recently served as the deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, told DefenseScoop regarding the cyber-enabled air superiority concept. “I hope they move very rapidly. And I hope they move to the other core missions that the Air Force has, not just air superiority.”

Moore noted that while Cybercom is set up to primarily operate at the strategic to operational levels of war, the services must be engaged at the tactical level and provide cyber capabilities to their service component commanders.

“When I spoke with senior members of the Air Force, I had conversations about this, which was you can’t successfully accomplish your five core missions, one of which is air superiority, if you haven’t invested in success in the digital space — not just from a defensive standpoint, but from an offensive standpoint, because the best defense is still offense,” he explained.

“At the tactical levels, the services are going to need to produce capabilities that they present to the service component commander, just like any other capability. For example, it might be a cyber capability, employed in conjunction with some type of EW capability, that comes off one of our fifth-generation aircraft like the F-22 or F-35. Those types of capabilities, tools and weapons are not the types of things that are really the main focus of Cyber Command. So we need the services to do this,” he added.

Tapping the National Guard

As part of the concept, the Air Force will be relying on a new National Guard unit, the 179th Cyberspace Wing, based in Mansfield, Ohio. In fact, the Air Force re-missioned this wing from a C-130 wing to become the first ever Air National Guard cyber wing.

Cyber-enabled air superiority is broader than just this unit — with contributions from the Air Force’s main cyber organization, 16^th Air Force — but the 179th will be a key player.

According to the unit’s website, it’s new mission “will provide cyber-enabled capabilities supporting tactical needs in air superiority and information warfare, which will provide a competitive advantage in combat performance and survivability in joint force operations.”

A National Guard Bureau memo in May of 2023 providing guidance on the 2022 National Defense Strategy, lauded the Air Guard for its overall innovation, noting that it develops asymmetric capabilities that informs future force design and is “leading innovation in the Information Warfare domain through establishment of a first of its kind Cyberspace Wing and development of the Cyber-Enabled Air Superiority operational concept.”

According to the unit, the process of re-missioning will take time. Its near-term focus is recruiting, training, retraining, creating infrastructure and updating the unit to prepare for the new mission, with the goal to reach initial operating capability sometime in 2025 and full operating capability sometime in 2027.

A spokesperson from the unit said the Air Force has committed nearly $150 million to the 179th for the establishment of a new Cyberspace Operations Group, ensuring it has the resources to deliver the competitive edge for joint forces in the cyber domain. Over the next five years, the president’s budget plans include $349.3 million for facilities, manpower, training and equipment to establish the 179th as an Air National Guard cyber-enabled air superiority unit, according to an Air Force spokesperson.

What is cyber-enabled air superiority?

Officials and sources weren’t totally forthcoming on the types of capabilities and missions these forces would be conducting, due to obvious sensitivities. Some have hinted that it will be mostly RF-type activities to create cyber effects, or active cyber-type effects launched from active electronically scanned array radars to disable enemy integrated air defense systems.

“We’re a wing that’s gonna produce leading-edge cyber effects in the next high-end conflict. That is just amazing because we would be at the leading edge. We’re not flying all the airplanes anymore, but we will help dominate the skies and have air superiority in the next fight. And our forces depend on us,” Col. Darren Hamilton, the commander of the 179th, said during the redesignation ceremony in September.

It could also be leveraging the variety of connected sensors the military plans to architect in the coming years.

“If we think about JADC2 properly, it won’t just be about moving data around between sensors and shooters. While that is important, and must be defended from a cyber perspective, we also need to think about JADC2 as an extension of our offensive cyber capabilities. We can use the JADC2 network to deliver cyber capabilities, not just traditional military capabilities and effects,” said Moore, the former Air Force three-star, referencing the Pentagon’s top priority of 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.

According to a 16th Air Force spokesperson, the intent is to posture the 179th to deliver non-kinetic effects to increase survivability of air platforms in a highly contested environment. That will provide an opportunity to evolve the capabilities, tactics and operational concepts necessary to integrate cyber capabilities and other non-kinetic effects with theater air components’ scheme of maneuver.

The 179th will also provide additional capacity to support ongoing operations in the information environment, the 16th Air Force spokesperson added. The expectation is that the 179th will provide expertise and focus on unique capabilities that integrate electromagnetic spectrum operations and radio frequency capabilities with cyber ops.

Officials explained that the cyber-enabled air superiority concept requires a blending of the total force to be successful.

“By partnering closely from the beginning, the Air Force has been able to harness ANG’s operational expertise in designing and building fully mission capable, combat equipped elements that are ready to be mobilized when needed in competition and conflict,” a spokesperson from the 179th stated. “Cyber-enabled air superiority will support tactical air domain objectives though cyberspace. Broadly speaking, our goal is to help secure a competitive advantage for joint forces to get in and out of airspace safely, increasing our effectiveness across all domains.”

The 179th also complements 16th Air Force activities with a focus on delivering cyber effects to enable air operations, the 16^th Air Force spokesperson said, noting that although the 179th will be focused on creating operational and tactical-level effects for a theater air component commander within a joint task force or combatant command, the 179th’s capabilities will be synchronized with Cybercom’s broader mission.

When it comes to what the concept will require, at the very least, experts noted that the forces will need kit and possibly infrastructure to operate.

“The challenges aren’t going to surprise you. You’re going to have to have a commitment to fund the billets and actually train and place the people in the positions. It’s one thing to talk about all these things, it’s another thing to follow through with the prioritization of the commitment of resources,” Moore said.

He added that policy and authorities will be another key issue to flesh out.

“The one area that is going to require some work is policy and authorities because to get where we are today requires an incredible amount of transparency and openness about cyber operations that we’re performing with other members of the interagency and our friends and allies,” he said. “There’s a lot of organizations that have legitimate equities in this space, but when you get down to the tactical level the time to act and … to be proactive can’t be constrained by strategic-level policies and authority frameworks.”

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Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey is a leader in the U.S. Air Force’s modernization efforts. Currently, he’s the Department of the Air Force’s Integrating Program Executive Officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management (C3BM). In this role, he oversees the development of the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a key part of the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative. Before that, Brig. Gen. Cropsey managed the Air Force’s Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate, which supports foreign military sales to over 110 countries. His focus on simplifying complex systems is a key part of his approach to modernizing the Air Force’s capabilities.

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The sea service is aiming to acquire AI-enabled drones that are “consumable,” Rear Adm. Stephen Tedford said Monday during a briefing at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

For major U.S. military weapon systems, sustainment can sometimes account for about 70% of the lifecycle cost. But for CCAs, the Navy doesn’t want to follow that model.

“We’re trying to get after CCAs in a revolutionary way, intentionally trying to avoid ACAT 1, 35-year lifecycle sustainment of a platform. I don’t need them that long. I need a platform that instead of buying 500, I’ll buy 60. Okay. And I can do them in a rolling wave so I can keep pace with the technology of the unmanned platforms, but also keep pace with the threat by upgrading sensors, platforms, systems, weapons, and I can do it at a recurring investment cost,” Tedford told DefenseScoop during the briefing.

“I’m also trying to do this so that my unit cost of the platform is as absolutely low as possible — trying to keep it at around the $15 million mark, okay, because I need it to be considered consumable. Okay. I want something that’s going to fly for a couple hundred hours, [and for] it’s last hour it’s either a target or a weapon. I’m either going to hit something with it or I’m going to train and shoot it down. But I’m not going to sustain it for 30 years. So if you’re any cost estimators out there, those are zeros in sustainment,” he added.

The systems could also be designed with the assumption that they won’t have to conduct nearly as many catapult launches or landings — also known as cats and traps — on an aircraft carrier as today’s manned fighter jets, he suggested.

“It’s not a different way of launch and recovery, it’s a different way of looking at risk. So, I’m not trying to design a platform that’s going to do cyclic operations on an aircraft carrier the way we know it today where you’re launching and recovering every 45 minutes to an hour and a half. [That’s] not what we’re trying to design. That 200 hours [of total lifecycle flight time] may only have 10 cats and traps. Okay. We’re trying to limit that scope because if I do try to design something that has 6,000 hours of life and can do cats and traps all day, I just designed an F-18. [That’s] not what I’m trying to get after, right?” he said.

“So, I’m trying to limit that engineering space … and if I can keep the price point low enough and keep people in a consumable mindset, then I can also keep them in an engineering mindset that is equivalent,” Tedford added. “If I only need to launch it and recover it a handful of times, instead of throughout its lifecycle, I can completely change the engineering calculus involved.”

The Navy is hoping to field its first iteration of CCAs before 2030, he told DefenseScoop.

The service has been working with Australia on manned-unmanned teaming technologies. They plan to conduct an exercise next summer where a “section or division” of drones will be controlled or directed by a manned airborne asset.

In fiscal 2025, the Navy will also be kicking off additional analysis and study for CCA-related technologies.

“We’re going to be starting primarily on payloads and systems and sensors, not the platform. Okay. Every time we talk about CCAs, because the last letter is an ‘A’ and everybody says aircraft, they stop thinking about it as a weapon. I need to think about it as a weapon. So we’re going to focus on what do I need it to do? What sensors and gaps do we need to cover in combat? And then try to find the platform that keeps me at the low cost projected,” he explained.

There are a number of key enabling technologies that the Navy is focusing on advancing as it pursues next-generation unmanned platforms. Those include propulsion and power; networks and resilient command and control; payloads and sensor perception; launch and recovery; resilient positioning, navigation and timing; and AI and autonomy.

The U.S. Air Force is also pursuing CCAs, which it refers to as “collaborative combat aircraft.” It’s aiming to field the first iteration by the end of fiscal 2028. Navy officials have previously suggested that in the future the two services could potentially control each other’s drones.

Tedford said the Air Force is taking the lead in some areas, with the Navy in a follower role.

“The Air Force has the lead on developing the government reference architecture standards for how we’re going to be getting after AI and autonomy. This is the interfaces, this is the language, this is the definitions” of autonomy, Tedford said.

The effort comes as the Pentagon is pursuing a warfighting concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), with the aim of better connecting sensors, shooters and data across the services and key international partners.

“The government reference architecture is how we are going to be playing in this space, so that all of our systems, control systems, platforms are interoperable. Where we’re specifically going, whether it’s with a cooperative combat aircraft or existing unmanned platforms, is that we need to be able to get all of the information that those platforms ingest and transmit and get it to any and all platforms. Okay. I am not interested in pursuing a proprietary solution that will only talk to one specific proprietary platform. It has to be universal, it has to be interdependent, and it has to be interchangeable. That includes the sensors, that includes the [common operating picture], that includes the message traffic, and it includes the intel. Okay. We’re going to be taking these platforms and putting them out into combat operations, and everybody needs to be pulling from the same information-trusted source and not questioning where it’s coming from,” Tedford said.

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The Pentagon’s JADC2 warfighting concept aims to connect sensors and shooters from across the U.S. military under a more unified network to enable faster and more effective decision-making and employment of forces, with the aid of artificial intelligence and other enabling tools. In February, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced that the “minimum viable capability” for it “is real and ready now.”

It’s already being used by Centcom, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of Air Forces Central and Combined Forces Air Component, told reporters Wednesday during a Defense Writers Group meeting. Centcom has been battling drone swarms, missile strikes and other threats in the region from the Houthis, ISIS and other groups.

“The proliferation of unmanned technologies and missile technologies, and the combination of ballistic cruise missiles, UAVs — all these unmanned things that can come at you at different speeds in different directions — does add complexity to the overall defensive architecture for how we have dealt with that. I mean it truly is a multi-domain, multi-service response that we have to orchestrate in these instances. So there’s a number of different systems that we use in the joint world to do this. Some of them are, you know, top secret systems that pull in a bunch of different intel sources together to try to build coherent understanding. The one that is new and Centcom has really been pushing and all the components are on now is the kind of the minimum viable product of JADC2,” Grynkewich said.

“I would say it’s a common operating picture that pulls in feeds from everywhere. I almost think of … the game Hungry Hippo. It is [the] Hungry Hippo of data. And it’s going out and it’s pulling in lots of data, and then you can layer it and look at it different ways. So it’s really trying to use data centricity to build understanding. The thing that that does is that synchronizes us across the domains and components to have a coherent picture. So now … my battle cabs conversations with the [Naval Forces Central] maritime ops center, they’re looking at the same basic picture,” he added.

Commanders still have to take into account the sources of the data and assess their confidence in it, he noted.

“But when you understand all of that, you can have that common picture, and now you can make real-time decisions in seconds about — is the ship going to engage that [threat]? Is a fighter going to engage it? Do we need to call one of our partners to warn them about it? Etcetera, etcetera. So that’s a key part of it,” Grynkewich told reporters.

Task Force 99

Meanwhile, Centcom’s Task Force 99 is evaluating and experimenting with new drones to help the military field cost-effective unmanned aerial systems to improve its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

The organization was stood up about a year-and-a-half ago amid a broader push by U.S. Central Command to boost its unmanned capabilities and enabling technologies.

AFCENT wants to find alternatives to very high-end drones, Grynkewich told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters Wednesday.

“The inventory of unmanned aerial vehicles that we have right now … all come with different price points with different capabilities. And there’s a tradeoff there, you know, more expensive/more exquisite, less expensive/less exquisite. We’re trying with Task Force 99 to find a way to thread the needle where we can use commercial off-the-shelf technologies or things that we develop in-house, to develop something that has a bit more capability than you might find on a standard off-the-shelf drone but doesn’t cost nearly as much [as high-end platforms]. And the reason you don’t want the cost to be so high is so you can sustain losses when you take them or so that you can have affordable mass and bring volume to the fight,” he said.

Grynkewich added: “So, Task Force 99 is working that very hard right now. They have a couple of promising technologies. I won’t get into exactly what they are. But … the task I’ve given them is I need them to figure out a way to flood the zone with additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance so we can identify these threats … faster, better, cheaper than we can right now. They’re getting really close.”

DefenseScoop asked Grynkewich if the task force is currently aiding U.S. military operations against the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea.

“Their task is to develop solutions that we can apply in Yemen or elsewhere. We have used their capabilities in the [Centcom area of responsibility] in actual combat conditions before. I won’t say where it was, but we have done that before and I intend to do it again as soon as we have the right capability to apply in the right environment,” he said.

Replicator

Another Pentagon initiative that’s intended to help the department acquire more affordable “mass” is Replicator. The stated goal of the first iteration of the effort, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced last year, is to deliver thousands of relatively low-cost, “attritable” unmanned systems across multiple domains in 18-to-24 months to help U.S. forces counter China’s military buildup.

The Army and Navy are said to be highly involved in the early stages of the project, but the Air Force not so much.

Grynkewich noted that U.S. enemies are using drone swarms and he’d like to turn the tables.

“You’re seeing that play out as adversaries are attempting to use mass to overwhelm our defenses. That’s really what it comes down to — it’s affordable mass to try overwhelm our defenses … I would like to turn that around and use affordable mass to try to overcome the defenses of adversaries as well. Replicator is trying to identify which of the solutions that we have that … is affordable but we haven’t quite figured out how to scale it,” he told reporters. “So I think that it’s a fantastic initiative of the low-cost technologies to get that affordable mass.”

Replicator is primarily aimed at countering China in the Indo-Pacific. But Grynkewich said those types of capabilities would be useful in any conflict in any region of the world.

However, he noted that he doesn’t see low-cost drones as a silver bullet.

“In my view, the flip side of it is, I don’t think that that means that some of the more exquisite weapon systems — whether they’re manned or unmanned, and irrespective of domain — are irrelevant at all,” Grynkewich told reporters.

The Air Force, for example, will still need next-generation drones like collaborative combat aircraft, he suggested. CCAs are expected to serve as robotic wingmen operating alongside manned fighter jets and also perform other missions on their own.

“You would need some exquisite … unmanned technology like a collaborative combat aircraft that’s able to do certain things. And then you can follow that with affordable mass or you can pair it with the affordable mass,” Grynkewich said. “If you do just one and not the other, you won’t really optimize the system from a warfighting perspective.”

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The service’s integrated program executive office for command, control, communications and battle management (C3BM) issued a sources-sought notice Monday on Sam.gov for an “artificial intelligence and machine learning toolkit” that could improve reaction times.

Specifically, the service wants to apply the so-called toolkit to its cloud-based command and control (CBC2) effort. The Air Force is casting a broad net for capabilities that could be included in the toolkit, underscoring that AI and ML technologies can be used for different applications and problems, according to the request for information.

“This effort shall be a collection of tools and technologies that improve tactical C2 software applications under development within multiple programs (e.g., Cloud-Based Command and Control) and reduce operational workflow timelines for C2,” the RFI stated.

CBC2 is a key component of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System initiative and the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort. The warfighting concept aims to connect sensors and shooters from across the U.S. military and international partners under a single network, enabling faster and more effective decision-making and employment of forces.

The Air Force delivered an initial operating capability of CBC2 to the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Eastern and Canadian air defense sector in October 2023. The service plans to continue scaling that capability to other air defense sectors throughout this year.

The platform integrates hundreds of critical air defense radar and data feeds under one cloud-based interface, then develops courses of action from which leaders can quickly make high-quality decisions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are used to assist commanders in the decision-making process and help maintain situational awareness

Now, the RFI indicates that the Air Force is interested in incorporating other advanced and commercialized AI and ML technologies — including data collection and curation; machine-to-machine operations; large language models; and continuous and reinforced learning training models.

A full statement of objectives was not publicly available on Sam.gov because some of the information related to the notice was “controlled” access.

Responses to the RFI are due April 26.

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