How Marines’ Project Dynamis is Supporting CJADC2 Data Effort

The Defense Department’s ambitious Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) concept, a digital modernization strategy to integrate technology within the service branches across the military, has demanded efforts from every component of defense.

For the Marine Corps, that’s Project Dynamis, which has been folded into the Navy’s Project Overmatch.

The origins of Project Dynamis sprung from the desire to match similar efforts in the other service branches. Col. Jason Quinter, Commanding Officer, Marine Air Control Group 38, who previously served in the Joint Staff told GovCIO Media & Research that initiatives like Project Convergence, Project Overmatch and the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System spurred him to write an unpublished paper to the command calling for the development of a Marine Corps-directed initiative.

“I didn’t write it to go try to execute it by myself out on the fleet because obviously I don’t have the resources to do that, but I’m doing the best that I can to try to gin up interest,” Quinter said. “I spent two entire days explaining my strategy and my thoughts about all this stuff to try to get more people involved, and then Gen. Glavy essentially took it from me and became the advocate for it to the commandant of the Marine Corps.”

Quinter said that after leaving the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, he was deployed to Third Marine Aircraft Wing in San Diego as the G6 and focused his efforts on acquiring equipment and finding ways to integrate it into the network.

“I realized that we weren’t necessarily moving very quickly for acquisitions and stuff for C4 cyber things. It didn’t seem like we were as active in the CJADC2 space as the other services … it was still new. I think the services were kind of trying to figure out what it is that the [defense secretary] wanted everybody to do,” Quinter told GovCIO Media & Research.

Project Dynamis incorporates four lines of effort, from modernizing the service’s command, control, communications and computers (C4) network to transitioning services to the cloud, aggregating data so that it can be leveraged in AI/ML, LLMs and big data analytics and finally, educating the workforce and building its cyber literacy.

Quinter emphasized that uniting data under one system is critical to making CJADC2 interoperable between service branches, and currently challenges arise from bespoke systems within services.

“A lot of the challenge with CJADC2 is hardware interface issues. As we submit program objective memorandums, we buy equipment that’s unique to the Marine Corps, and the Army sometimes buys equipment that’s unique to the Army, and so on and so forth. In the process of doing that, we haven’t necessarily had a mandate to make sure that this piece of gear talks to this piece of gear. In some cases, it doesn’t necessarily work very easily because we have hardware interface issues or interoperability challenges,” Quinter said.

In addition to federating data between the services, Quinter said that cloud implementation will be critical to creating a functioning CJADC2 infrastructure.

“Implementing cloud on our networks is the critical requirement for CJADC2. Without cloud, JADC2 just is not going to come to fruition,” Quinter said.

He said the zero trust architecture that the entire federal government is transitioning to is a departure from the old method of doing things that included firewalls and principles like software-as-a-service and DevSecOps.

Quinter also harped on the importance of not only developing integration with novel technologies and principles like the cloud and AI, but also educating the workforce to leverage and further develop these technologies.

“We’re not currently teaching cloud in our formal schoolhouses in the Marine Corps. We will most definitely be teaching it, but we can only teach the technology that we have in the fleet. Since we don’t have cloud in the fleet yet, we’re still kind of just experimenting with it at the tip of the spear,” Quinter told GovCIO Media & Research.

According to Quinter, the Marines are still finding non-formalized ways to get educated on the cloud, from self-education to working with commercial partners like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to get specialized training for marines and sailors.

With Project Dynamis, the Marine Corps will be better able to integrate emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, large language models, 5G and even future technologies like post-quantum cryptography.

“The sky is the limit. I think we would only be limited by our imagination so far as like what we want to write applications for,” Quinter said, pointing at programs like the Marine Corps Software Factory working to develop software applications in house. “I think one of the benefits to being able to leverage 5G at the edge of the network is a lot of the software could be stitched together by active duty Marines that understand how to code.”

Quinter currently oversees about 3,300 Marines in his command and has spent much of the past year building capabilities and integrating technologies for them to learn as a part of Dynamis, “moving at the pace we can afford to.”

The rest of the DOD has also moved at a rapid pace to meet its seven-year modernization implementation plan deadline with programs like the Replicator initiative, the Raider initiative and the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve.

“We’re moving faster than we probably have ever moved. You’d have to go back to the heartbeat of the military industrial complex in like the 1930s, 1940s, ramping up to World War II, for where we moved this quickly on new technology and we were building things that quickly, that fast at scale,” Quinter said.

Dynamis’ unique position of being folded into the Navy’s Project Overmatch offers opportunities for the Marine Corps and Navy to closely collaborate on CJADC2 and achieve “greater economies of scale,” according to Quinter.

“We didn’t create a joint program office for it, but we are trying to make sure that Convergence, Overmatch, ABMS and Project Dynamis are kind of moving in the same direction,” Quinter said. “Is there 100% overlap? No, but we are working very closely with the Navy.”