Executive Mosaic is honored to present Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, chief information officer and director of command, control, communications and computers/cyber at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a 2021 Wash100 Award recipient for spearheading the development of the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy and leading innovative technology efforts.
This marks Crall’s first Wash100 Award. In May 2020, President Trump nominated Crall to assume the roles within the Joint Staff J-6 directorate, which supports C4 and cyber requirements and capability development processes for the joint information environment.
Most notably, Crall has led the JADC2 Strategy. The top-level, classified strategy will outline the U.S. military’s new approach to decision-making in future conflicts with peer adversaries.
In Nov. 2020, Crall said that the JADC2 Strategy will formulate objectives for JADC2 around three areas, including collecting data from every platform on the battlefield and accelerating the transmission of data to warfighters for use in decision-making.
“We’re looking at things that really are open, easy to see, easy to adjust, easy to manipulate, and truthfully work well with other things,” Crall said. He added that the Department of Defense (DoD) does not want to rely excessively on proprietary technology platforms for JADC2 and is not interested in vendor lock-in arrangement.
“And industry has asked us, ‘Would DoD please lead and tell us what those standards, attributes, interfaces and architectures are?’ And that’s precisely what we’re building in the annexes that go with the strategy document for JADC2. So that will soon be revealed — exactly what these inputs and outputs look like from a mission engineering perspective,” Crall stated.
In Jan. 2021, Crall said that the military intends to analyze requirements of a planned multi-domain C2 approach. As the military plans to implement an integration of sensors and weapon systems through the JADC2 approach, J6 wants to identify JADC2’s possible gaps.
Crall projected that the analysis will produce a JADC2 posture review based on the results. The gap analysis will inform J6’s funding strategy for JADC2, he noted. Crall said this approach will require automation across all systems involved to ensure information can move to where it is needed.
“It is about taking advantage of that sensory-rich environment — looking at things like data standards; making sure that we can move this information into an area that, again, we can process it properly; bringing on cloud; bringing on artificial intelligence, predictive analytics; and then undergirding this with a network that can handle this, all domains and partners,” he said.
In addition to rounding out the JADC2 strategy, Crall has led massive data efforts to create more efficiency in warfare. How data is organized, accessed, analyzed and dispersed in real time to decision makers is key to the success of JADC2 and is a core aspect of the developing strategy, said Crall.
“This joint warfighting capability will use material and non-materiel solutions to derive information advantage through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics. The data-centric and algorithmic warfare envisioned in future conflicts requires a data fabric with clearly identified components and functions essential to establishing the foundation of JADC2,” added Crall.
To drive this transformation, the Joint Staff and DoD’s chief data officer David Spirk have agreed to lead a new process to set data standards for all future military sensors and weapons to connect at machine speed, which will serve as the foundation for success in All Domain Operations.
The new standards will inform capability requirements for JADC2, Crall said. The new process involves experts and chief data officers from all military services, Combatant Commands, DoD offices and the Intelligence Community (IC).
A common data fabric will set standards and IT services that allow data to be shared among different weapon systems, C2 networks, organizations and services, spanning different levels of security.
Executive Mosaic congratulates Dennis Crall and the Joint Staff on his first Wash100 Award. Crall’s efforts to drive defense transformation, modernization strategies and data management will continue to influence the future of warfare, cementing his position in the federal (GovCon) sector.
About Wash100
This year represents the eighth annual Wash100 award selection. The Wash100 is the premier group of private and public sector leaders selected by Executive Mosaic’s organizational and editorial leadership as the most influential leaders in the GovCon sector.
These leaders demonstrate skills in leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement, and vision. Visitors to Wash100.com can sign in and vote for the executives they believe will have the greatest impact on government contracting in the coming year.
The media team at Executive Mosaic writes individualized articles for each recipient of the Wash100 award, providing a write up on the executive centered around their career history and highlights.
