Defense Officials Talk Commercial-First Approach to CJADC2

The next phase of combined joint all domain command and control (CJADC2) development will require a commercial-first approach, defense leaders said at the Defense IT Summit in Arlington, Virginia, last week.

CJADC2 has entered a “show me” era where pilots are being replaced with fully scaled-up and effective solutions stemming from the commercial sector.

“We’ve all moved into a show me data era,” said Department of the Navy Acting CTO Justin Fanelli. “Now we’re at a place where we can execute, and we can be more commercial first. … This is a divest-to-invest era. Where are the areas where best of breed is not in place? Where can we bring in commercial first, and some assembly of small partners who are showing complete outcomes overmatch, and then turning off everything underneath it?”

Fanelli said that organizations like the Department of the Navy, DISA and Navy Installations Command have embarked on joint piloting of systems and called on industry to inform government where it can provide solutions at scale.

“In general, we are trying to be a lot clearer on the things that we measure, and then how to work with us. If you have competing documents, if you have competing guidance, let us know, and we’ll clarify that,” Fanelli told the audience.

Tommy Gardner, CTO at HP Federal, said that a commercial approach must involve all of industry and be compatible and adaptable.

“It’s got to be all of industry. We cannot have a proprietary solution in the industry and say, ‘Oh, if the government buys this, we’ll be set for life,’” Gardner said. “We need to be open, plug-and-play, modular-based and make incremental improvements where we can and revolutionary improvement where it makes sense, and the money’s right to be able to scale it up.”

Gardner said that as CJADC2 moves to a commercial-first approach, it must also be compatible with allies and partners around the world.

“We will never fight alone. I don’t think that’s in the cards. We have to be ready to work with the allied friends that we have to protect ourselves against the adversaries,” Gardner said.

Christopher Redding, technical director of PEO Services at DISA, said his department’s challenges center around investing in the right pilots that are capable of being scaled to the agency at large.

“How do we take the limited department-wide resources and make sure that we’re focusing in on it? Where do we put the right investment?” Redding told the audience. “We still have to do the experimentation pieces because that’s where the real innovation happens. How are we as a department making sure that we’re balancing that need on investment on the experimentation?”

Redding emphasized the department’s need to navigate the “delicate balancing act” of investing in the right pilots, meeting the CJADC2 mission requirements and maintaining security between all of its interconnected systems and sensors.

Shery Thomas, enterprise information officer at Navy Installations Command, said that as emerging technology enters the fold, the military must be prepared to integrate it without completely upending or dismantling the systems that CJADC2 functions on.

“You can’t have a changeover every 6 months based on Moore’s law. Yes, technology changes. But at the same time, we’ve got to figure out plug-and-play in terms of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or some kind of software-hardware modeling that will allow that,” Thomas told the audience. “It has to scale quickly. Yes, that software solution scales. But it doesn’t conform to that legacy hardware, too?”

Redding said that the impact of emerging technology like AI and quantum will be felt when DOD organizations fully implement security measures and processes and are able to manage large volumes of data.

“Once we have that data layer right, that enables all of those other really cool things we can start doing with AI. We can start making leaps forward and how fast we can do decision-making with quantum computing and all of those other pieces,” Redding said.