Defense industry executives say they want to get more direction from the Pentagon on how to approach the military-wide Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort, citing a lack of mission threads that have led companies to attempt to independently assess what's needed.
The situation, leaders from MITRE, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and L3Harris Technologies told a National Defense Industrial Association symposium today in McLean, VA, means that contractors often make decisions without knowing fully what the Defense Department’s priorities entail.
“We haven’t seen those mission threads, so now we’re probably all in a situation where we’re defining them ourselves,” Willy Andersen, vice president of multidomain special programs and capabilities for Boeing Phantom Works, said during a JADC2 integration panel.
Without the military creating an overarching framework for the program, Dave Johnson, L3Harris’ vice president of strategy for the integrated missions systems segment, warned officials could repeat some of the pitfalls the Air Force saw in the early years of the Advanced Battle Management System.
ABMS, the Air Force’s push to enable JADC2 by overhauling its own command and control and battle management systems, has recently entered a more targeted, delivery-focused phase, largely under the oversight of service Secretary Frank Kendall.
But the program had initially embraced an approach heavy on experimentation and demonstration championed by then-acquisition executive Will Roper -- one that was met with strong congressional skepticism that led to lawmakers slashing the program’s requested budget for fiscal year 2021.
Johnson said the Air Force’s initial communications on ABMS made it difficult to gauge whether officials were prioritizing connectivity, sensing, processing or another area. The result was a vacuum of knowledge that forced companies “to make assumptions” and attempt to funnel independent research and development dollars in the right directions.
“The government has a responsibility to help set some high-level architecture and standard principles,” he said. “I think that was missing early on in ABMS and caused how we lost two years of time because we didn’t have that.”
To help identify Lockheed’s path forward, as well as potential capability gaps that could be good targets for IRAD funds, Stacy Kubicek, the general manager and vice president for the company’s space division, said executives have created “roadmaps” for JADC2.
House and Senate authorizers in their initial work on the FY-23 defense policy bill included several proposed changes to the JADC2 undertaking. For example, the House Armed Services Committee signed off on a measure that would require the Government Accountability Office to review officials' planned schedule and costs tied to building a military-wide internet of things, citing concern over the Pentagon's progress in implementing JADC2.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, is seeking to boost the JADC2 budget by $245 million and establish a new joint force headquarters in the Indo-Pacific, according to a summary released last month.
As industry continues its work to enable JADC2, some executives questioned whether there will be a need for a traditional system integrator within DOD to validate company offerings and piece them together for the program.
Eliahu Niewood, the Air and Space Forces vice president for MITRE, noted that since JADC2 isn’t a system in his view, the work requires a “much more dynamic” approach for bringing capabilities to the table and plugging them in.
Underpinning that, he said, would be a “set of very high standards” that contractors are able to build to as “the integration role almost goes away.”
At Boeing, Andersen said the company is working to help build a foundation that would facilitate easier collaboration across companies as capabilities tied to JADC2 are brought online.
“Eventually there’s going to be a quarterback within the government that’s driving down to that level,” he said. “Not yet, but we all assume that that’s going to happen soon, and we’re trying to lay all the big pieces together so that we can do it more quickly.”