Key to the Pentagon’s concept for modern war is standardization

As the Department of Defense is working to connect all the disparate data sets and sensors from each service, standardization will be a critical component to realizing the vision in the future.

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.”