The Department of Defense (DoD) has officially transitioned from the concept phase and into the execution stage of developing its meta-network of connected sensors to coordinate all the armed forces – the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) system – with technology leaders now addressing the challenges of bringing it to fruition.
“We’re in execution time now,” said Justin Fanelli, acting chief technology officer and technical director for the Navy’s Program Executive Office (PEO) for Digital and Enterprise Services, during the GovCIO Defense IT Summit on Feb. 27.
CJADC2 is the department’s approach to providing commanders with an information and decision-making advantage across all warfighting domains – land, sea, air, space, and cyber.
By integrating command and control across these areas, DoD aims to improve operational effectiveness and give warfighters an edge in deterring or defeating adversaries worldwide. In February 2024, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the successful delivery of the CJADC2’s initial iteration, marking a key step in enhancing joint and coalition operations.
“There was a long lead up to this point, too long in a lot of cases, but now we’re at a place where we can execute, and we can be more commercial first,” Fanelli said today.
But before the department can bring its CJADC2 framework to fruition, there are several challenges to address, Fanelli explained. The first of those is addressing the department’s expansive technical debt, which he described as a “divest and invest area.”
“There are many existing systems and significant tech debt,” Fanelli said, emphasizing that the department needs to ask, “Where are the areas lacking best-of-breed solutions? Where can we introduce commercial solutions first, along with small partners delivering complete outcomes over a mesh, and then phase out the legacy systems underneath?”
Another critical area the DoD must address is its data, especially as the department looks to emerging capabilities like automation and AI to build up its CJADC2 framework, according to Christopher Redding, technical director for PEO Services at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
“Foundationally, what are we looking at when we’re adopting and building AI? Do we have the right data? From a CJADC2 perspective, are we tagging everything? What are we doing up front to prepare ourselves to take advantage of all that data? Where are we scoring all this historical data so we can train our AI models and begin leveraging them for various applications?” Redding said today.
“And on top of that, what are we doing from a standards perspective to ensure that all of our CJADC2 systems use the same data model?” he added. “Once we have that data in place, in my opinion, that enables all of those other really cool things you can start doing with AI.”
