The Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, or JADC2, has been a high priority for leaders across the defense landscape as they work to provide the United States’ joint force with a connected, unified network to accelerate data sharing and decision making.
The Air Force’s response to the Pentagon’s JADC2 effort is the Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS, the operational optimization of which Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has made one of his seven operational imperatives and top priorities. In its latest iteration, ABMS has become one of many components that make up the Department of the Air Force’s enterprise-wide JADC2 contributions known as the DAF Battle Network.
During the Potomac Officers Club’s 2023 Annual Air Force Summit, an expert panel discussion featuring DAF leaders, government decision makers and industry executives centered around data and digital engineering at the heart of the DAF Battle Network.
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To kick off the panel, Dr. Bryan Tipton, DAF chief of architecture and engineering and program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, gave the in-person audience a history of ABMS and a definition of what the DAF Battle Network means to him.
“ABMS has been simultaneously used as the strategy for everything for the Department of Air Force, our answer for JADC2, it’s a set of requirements that come from A5 and Space Force. And it’s also a small — relatively small, it’s growing — portfolio inside of one PEO that acquires some specific things… They can’t all be the same thing, the same term. It’s confusing,” Dr. Tipton said at the POC summit.
Thus, the DAF Battle Network was born. The new term better reflects the DAF’s effort to achieve better integration, and it encompasses many different programs and elements that are all working toward achieving JADC2 goals.
“I will define it as it is the integrated delivery of the Department of the Air Force to the warfighter to provide the network that they fight on that connect sensors, shooters and c2,” Dr. Tipton explained. “It’s not just the IT stuff that we love so much, but it’s also the operational side too, of how do we fight in the future as a distributed force?”
Across the DAF, which comprises the Air Force and Space force, leaders agree that integration has been a key challenge to overcome. Shannon Pallone, deputy PEO for battle management command, control and communications for the Space Systems Command, echoed Secretary Kendall’s earlier keynote comments, saying, “We’re really good at having the vision, and then actually bringing that vision to life is really hard.”
Integration and interoperability, she explained, are tougher to define and nail down than some more concrete deliverables and requirements, making them somewhat enigmatic and more difficult to achieve.
“Any individual program has a mission, has a set of requirements that they’re going to go meet, always has that elusive KPP that says, ‘Interoperability — well what does that mean? How do I put that on contract? How do I define that? How am I working with my industry partners on how I’m going to actually realize that?’ That’s not as simple,” Pallone shared.
But the DAF Battle Network’s construct brings a myriad of programs together toward one goal, which Pallone asserted has the effect of elevating each individual program too.
“When you’re faced with decisions of, ‘I need to deliver this system,’ you’re going to optimize for the system, you’re not going to necessarily optimize for the network. I think this is a really great construct to shift that focus to say, ‘If you’re not optimizing your system to deliver to the network, are you really part of the joint fight?’” she posed.
Stu Whitehead, deputy director for cyber and command, control, communications and computers integration for the Joint Staff J6, noted that the challenge of integration doesn’t just exist within the Air Force, the DOD or even the U.S., but that it’s a much broader global issue as we prepare for potential future conflicts.
“How do you integrate 11 combatant commands operationally to do all the things that they need to do? That means the integration of all of our transport layer capabilities. That also means I have to integrate… we’ll just say the data fabric level,” Whitehead posed.
“How am I going to make sure that we can actually share information across services, across communities, but more importantly, how do we accelerate and enable our operational processes that typically involve programs of record from multiple services and that with allies?” he asked. “That’s the challenge from my perch.”
Whitehead predicted that moving from net-centric to data-centric operations will cause a paradigm shift in the way government leaders think about data and information flows and how to protect them.
“In my view, what we’re going to see over time is this migration of… segmented networks to a communications mesh where we’re more involved in, ‘How do I do information flow? If we’re in contact, if something’s taken down, how do I manage the movement of data and information around the battlefield, leveraging each service’s capability so that we can have unity of effort?’” said Whitehead.
On the technology side of the DAF Battle Network and ABMS conversation, artificial intelligence is becoming integral to building a data fabric that can support and enable these programs. The Office of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer was tasked earlier this year with aligning and coordinating JADC2 across all defense components.
Dr. Jennifer Cowley, cognitive engineer of the CDAO’s chief technology office, said she’s looking at how AI can play a role in propelling JADC2 forward and helping to create a foundational data fabric.
“From a data fabric part, we’re really thinking about things like standards and AI enablers because we can’t really build systems per se, that’s the job of the services. However, we can provide guidance, support and suggestions and recommendations for what that fabric should look like, how that gets quality data quickly to decision makers at the highest echelons of the battlefield and even down to the lower operational level,” Dr. Cowley said.
One key challenge Cowley is seeing is a difference in vocabulary or ontology between services, and she said setting a standard for data labeling needs to be prioritized. Thankfully, AI can help.
“We’ve been looking at AI to expedite the labeling of data period point blank in a standardized fashion. And we’ve been looking at our vendor population to be able to generate on-the-fly ontology so that when a MILDEP starts to label it off kilter, a little bit away from a standard or an ontology that name is hosting, then we have that evidence and we can go back and either build data exchanges between the two versions, or we can force them into a standardized uniform way of labeling,” she shared.
“So AI is really advancing in the labeling community in terms of computer vision and imagery,” Dr. Cowley added.
AI and machine learning are also being deployed on the industry side of the government contracting ecosystem to help military branches operate in contested environments. Dr. John Rivard, director of advanced concepts at Ultra Intelligence and Communications, said part of his work is focused on the decision ability warfighters will have in contested environments in which only three or four bits can be transmitted per second.
“What we’re looking at is being able to integrate those high side and low side data streams as well as then putting machine learning algorithms on top of it that allow it to identify anomalies within an operational purview that would then alert an operator to something that they should be aware of,” Dr. Rivard said.
“We’re launching a product called RAIN, which will do that, but we also are looking at being able to provide a course of action generation in real time,” he added.
