The U.S. Army is prioritizing investments in command and control (C2) capabilities to accelerate the Pentagon’s pursuit for a fully connected military force, an Army executive said on Wednesday.
Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical, said during a C4ISRNET event that a key area of investment for the service branch is C2 because “to have a joined force its critical to share data and have a common situational understanding.”
“[We’re] building this out in a [Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2)] way for situational understanding for how we do target, target custody for fires, etc.,” Kitz said. “[It’s] an investment on having common lexicons around how we expose data to the enterprise so that we can have a holistic C2 apparatus.”
He added that because the military forces will operate in different environments, the data is going to look vastly different. Therefore, investing and building “a network and a C2 system that can be resilient to these future environments that we’re going to operate in,” is critical, Kitz said.
Experiments performed in tandem by the military forces have helped highlight the importance of data interoperability in a fully connected force, as well as yielded some tangible results, he said. For example, during the most recent Project Convergence experiment – known as Capstone 4 – the Army and the Navy directly integrated their kit and were able to bring together their data environments.
“Project Convergence offered sort of this real opportunity for us to bring these capabilities together in a real operational way and . . . get through sort of the challenges of data interoperability,” Kitz said.
Additionally, Kitz explained that these investments in C2 capabilities will not result in a single solution for all branches of the military, but instead will produce common principles around data.
“We’re not even going to get to one solution across the Army. But we do need to get common ways for how we expose or use data and have a lexicon around our data, and our data governance,” Kitz said.
However, Kitz recognized that much progress needs to be made for the Army and the other military forces to build a “holistic C2” system for CJADC2 efforts, particularly because the Army continues to have problems internally with its own data.
The Army has made several efforts to improve its C2 system, the most recent came as a mostly classified special notice to private companies with a Joint Certification Program for insight on creating and maintaining C2 network technology.
