Future Joint Force Will Rely on Industry-Led Tech, Joint Chiefs Chairman Says

Private sector innovation will drive the future joint force with advanced tools to help commanders anticipate cyber threats and respond to escalation proactively, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the War Department’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the 2025 Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. this week.

Caine, who rose to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 2025, said during a fireside chat that advanced tech tools could help commanders “understand the environment that we’re operating in and to help leaders see and sense the risk that we’re facing [and] proactively and not reactively position our thinking and the joint force to be prepared for those and always be striving to manage and control that.”

Leveraging Private Sector Innovation

Caine praised the private sector’s role in driving innovation, saying the “innovative spirits, diabolical leaders, cunning [and] entrepreneurial leaders” spread throughout industry give a tactical edge to the joint force.

“As we think about the joint force of the future, much of that joint force is going to be designed and built through the work that the entrepreneurial private sector is going to do, whether it’s in our excellent large cap primes, or new entrants, or those scrappy founders that are out there trying to come up with a new thing,” Caine told the audience.

Caine said interoperability is a key component of a technologically-backed command and control system. He mentioned that partnerships and information can enhance the military’s ability to fight alongside the nation’s allies.

“I think we’re there on the interoperability side of the house in most of our combat capacity. I’m confident that we can go fight together and do great things together,” Caine said. “I still want some work to do some work on the information sharing, and there are bespoke things that our allies and partners bring to the table that we should do a bit of a better job at integrating together.”

He emphasized the “criticality of resilience,” adding that he wants to ensure the military is equipped not only for combat scenarios, but offensive and defensive cyber actions. “A single pane of glass” for commanders would enable them to observe and respond to crises rapidly and at scale.

“From the four-star down to the young private on the battlefield somewhere, all need to be able to see sense and understand the battle space in which they’re operating, and in order to do that at the scale of activities that we may see in a fight of the future, it’s going to require us to bring advanced technology into the into the into the joint force,” Caine said.

Responding to Rising Global Threats

Caine pointed to ongoing security concerns in Europe, the Pacific, Western Hemisphere and Middle East, suggesting “Tom Clancy, on his most inspired day, would probably struggle to come up with a number of serious and simultaneous events that are going on in the world right now.”

He added, “it’s all of these things when I think about a global risk algorithm and how to measure global risk, it’s comprised of many, many variables, not all equally weighted, but nonetheless, we see a lot of frothiness right now in the global security environment.”

Caine said he was “optimistic” that the Pentagon’s current leadership could rise to the task of creating competition and innovation in the War Department, but said any change would have to begin with culture.

A change in culture could navigate companies and their technologies through the metaphorical “valley of death” and create a new calculus where “new entrants, old entrants, new founders, new funders are coming to the table to ensure that we’re buying and fielding combat capability ahead of the technical development curve, not behind it,” Caine said.