12 November 2022

Pentagon seeks more ‘jointness’ for JADC2 as OSD stands up new office

JASPREET GILL

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to establish a new office aimed at bringing all the different efforts between the military services together under its currently disparate Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort, according to a Defense Department acquisition official.

“We are establishing a new office in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] called the Acquisition, Integration Interoperability Office and our first task is to take a look at how are we going to integrate — truly get JADC2 talking across the department,” Chris O’Donnell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for platform and weapon portfolio management in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD A&S), said Wednesday at the Association of Old Crows conference. He added that Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks has also “assigned the Chief [Digital] and AI Officer as the person who’s going to integrate all the data from JADC2.”

“So… there needs to be more jointness and we’re working towards that with those two offices,” he said. The new office, O’Donnell said, will be headed by Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare in OUSD A&S.

The news of a new office comes amid growing public pressure from some military officers for more high-level oversight for the sprawling effort. There is currently a JADC2 Cross-Functional Team, but that’s expected to phase itself out in coming years.

JADC2 is essentially the military’s attempt to ingest data from a myriad of sources, make sense of it, and get it to warfighters or battlefield commanders as quickly as possible. But each service has its own separate piece of JADC2. The Army is currently underway with its annual Project Convergence experiments, while the Navy has its secretive Project Overmatch and the Air Force is working on its Advanced Battle Management System.

Prior to this week’s announcement, in August Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters she wanted more high-level oversight of JADC2, and in September Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested the CDAO would be responsible for wrangling the initiative.

“So the deputy has asked the new Chief [Digital] and AI officer, whom I just had a conversation with a few days ago, to basically pull all this together and help organize it,” Kendall said at the Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference. “And I think [Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment] Bill LaPlante … and the [Chief Information Officer] John Sherman are all going to be a part of that as well. But I think it’s going to be led by the new Chief [Digital] and AI Officer, Craig Martell, who comes to us from industry and has a very good technical background. Hopefully he’ll be able to help pull it together. But there’s a definite need to do that.”

Before that, Army acquisition executive Doug Bush floated the idea of a joint JADC2-focused office back in July along with a large-scale exercise to help coordinate and focus the Pentagon’s efforts, especially when it comes to making sure requirements are stacked and prioritized. Following Bush’s comments, Wanda Jones-Heath, the principal cyber advisor for the Air Force and Space Force, spoke about the lack of interoperability between the three JADC2 efforts between the military services and that someone needed to “push” them where to go.

On Wednesday, O’Donnell said the new office will have to stand up without asking for a lot of money, saying Tremper is going to work through the budget process “to see what is necessary to make these things coming together from a budget perspective.”

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