Joint All-Domain Command and Control

Based on Wikipedia: Joint All-Domain Command and Control

The Pentagon's Quest to Make Every Weapon Talk to Every Other Weapon

Picture this scenario: A satellite spots an enemy missile launcher. Within seconds, that information flows to a Navy destroyer, an Air Force fighter jet, and an Army artillery battery simultaneously. An artificial intelligence system analyzes the data, calculates the optimal response, and presents options to commanders. The entire process takes seconds, not the minutes or hours it might have taken a generation ago.

This is the vision behind Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2. It represents one of the most ambitious military technology projects in American history—an attempt to wire together every sensor, weapon, and decision-maker across all five branches of the armed forces into a single, AI-powered network.

The concept sounds simple enough. The execution is anything but.

Why the Military Needs a Universal Translator

The United States military has a communication problem that dates back decades. Each branch—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force—developed its own systems, its own protocols, its own ways of doing things. A Navy ship and an Air Force plane might be operating in the same combat zone, but getting them to share information efficiently has historically been like asking two people who speak different languages to coordinate a complex task through hand signals.

This isn't just inefficient. In modern warfare, it can be deadly.

Consider what military planners call a "call for fire"—essentially a request for artillery or air support. In a traditional system, a soldier on the ground identifies a target, communicates up their chain of command, waits for authorization, and then coordinates with whatever asset will deliver the firepower. Each step introduces delay. Each handoff introduces the possibility of error or miscommunication.

Modern adversaries, particularly China and Russia, have invested heavily in what's known as anti-access/area denial capabilities. These are systems designed to keep American forces at a distance—long-range missiles, sophisticated radar networks, electronic warfare capabilities. Against such defenses, speed isn't just an advantage. It's a necessity for survival.

JADC2 aims to compress the time between detecting a threat and responding to it from minutes down to seconds. The goal is what the Pentagon calls "decision superiority"—the ability to understand the battlefield and act on that understanding faster than any adversary.

Five Branches, Four Major Projects, One Enormous Challenge

Each military branch has its own initiative feeding into the larger JADC2 vision. The Air Force calls theirs the Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS. The Army has Project Convergence. The Navy is working on Project Overmatch. The Space Force contributes through the National Defense Space Architecture, building the satellite networks that will carry much of this data around the globe.

These aren't separate, competing programs—at least not in theory. They're supposed to be different pieces of the same puzzle, each branch developing capabilities that will eventually plug into a unified whole.

The first major demonstration of how this might work came in December 2019, off the coast of Florida. The scenario involved defending against cruise missiles—the kind of fast, low-flying threats that give defenders very little time to react.

An impressive array of military hardware participated. F-22 and F-35 fighter jets flew overhead. A Navy destroyer patrolled the waters. Army radar systems scanned the skies. Commercial satellites and ground sensors contributed data. All of these systems, normally operating in their separate worlds, demonstrated that they could collect, analyze, and share information in real time.

The exercise proved something that sounds obvious but had never been demonstrated at scale: sensors from different services could indeed feed into a common picture of the battlefield.

From Florida to the Black Sea

Seven months later, in July 2020, the Pentagon pushed the concept further. This time, the exercise spanned from the continental United States to the Black Sea, with Air Force planes communicating with Navy ships positioned near Russia's backyard. Special operations forces from eight NATO countries participated, coordinating through the emerging network to respond to simulated Russian aggression.

The geographic scope mattered. Modern warfare doesn't respect neat boundaries. A conflict with a major power would span oceans and continents, requiring coordination across thousands of miles. JADC2 would need to work not just within a single theater but globally.

By November 2022, the exercises had evolved to demonstrate something Brigadier General Jeffery Valenzia described as "combined arms"—the military term for coordinating different types of forces (infantry, armor, artillery, air support) to achieve effects none could accomplish alone. JADC2 wasn't just about sharing data. It was about enabling entirely new ways of fighting.

The Cloud Wars Behind the Scenes

Building a network of this scale requires enormous computing infrastructure. In 2017, the Department of Defense proposed something called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI—a single $10 billion cloud computing contract intended for a single vendor.

The contract became a corporate battlefield. Amazon and Microsoft fought bitterly for the award. When Microsoft won, Amazon protested. The legal battle dragged on until the Pentagon eventually canceled the whole thing in 2021.

The replacement approach, called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), took a different tack. Instead of a single vendor, the $9 billion contract was split among four tech giants: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. The awards came through in December 2022.

But that's just the unclassified network. The Defense Information Systems Agency has been simultaneously upgrading its Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System—the network that carries the military's most sensitive, top-secret communications. That project uses the same vendors as JWCC, plus IBM. The goal is to eventually connect the classified and unclassified systems in ways that allow information to flow at the appropriate security levels.

Pentagon network officials now view JWCC as a foundational layer for JADC2. Without robust cloud infrastructure, the vision of connecting every sensor to every shooter simply cannot work.

Multi-Domain Operations: Fighting in Five Dimensions

To understand why JADC2 matters, you need to understand multi-domain operations—the military doctrine that JADC2 is designed to enable.

Traditional military thinking often organized around domains: land forces fought on land, naval forces fought at sea, air forces fought in the air. These domains overlapped, of course, but each had its specialists, its dedicated equipment, its ways of operating.

Multi-domain operations recognizes that modern warfare happens simultaneously across five domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. An enemy's air defense system might need to be disabled by cyber attack before aircraft can operate freely. Space-based sensors might provide the targeting data that allows ground artillery to strike naval vessels. The lines between domains have blurred into irrelevance.

In 2019, the Army stood up what it calls multi-domain battalions—single units designed to operate across air, land, space, and cyber domains simultaneously. These battalions are considering capabilities like hypersonic weapons, the kind of ultra-fast missiles that can strike targets thousands of miles away in minutes.

But all of this capability is useless without command and control systems that can coordinate it. A multi-domain battalion is only as good as its ability to receive targeting data from satellites, coordinate with aircraft, and communicate with naval forces. That's where JADC2 comes in.

The Kill Chain, Measured in Seconds

Military planners often talk about the "kill chain"—the sequence of steps from detecting a target to engaging it. Find, fix, track, target, engage, assess. Each step takes time. Reducing that time provides decisive advantage.

In August and September 2020, the Army conducted a five-week exercise at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The goal was to see how quickly different capabilities could be merged together. The results were striking.

On the ground, the tactical network demonstrated robust communications out to 36 miles. Using space-based systems, the range extended to 1,500 miles. Most impressively, kill chains—the time from detecting a target to firing on it—were measured in seconds, not minutes.

The exercise focused on penetrating anti-access/area denial defenses. The concept works in three phases. First, satellites detect enemy positions—the "penetrate" phase. Second, airborne assets attack the enemy's long-range weapons—the "dis-integrate" phase. Third, Army artillery, using targeting data from aircraft and satellites, fires on remaining targets—the "kinetic effect" phase.

This isn't just about firing faster. It's about using each service's strengths to create effects that none could achieve alone. Long-range Army missiles might probe enemy defenses, forcing the adversary to respond and reveal positions. Air Force aircraft might then eliminate the exposed threats, opening corridors for naval forces to operate.

The Thousand-Mile Probe

One particularly clever application comes from the Army's Long Range Precision Fires program. The director of that effort envisions using missiles with ranges exceeding a thousand miles as probes.

The idea works like this: fire a long-range munition at an adversary, forcing them to respond with their countermeasures. That response reveals where those countermeasures are located. It might even expose the location of the enemy's headquarters. Once revealed, those positions become targets.

As the planners darkly note, "an adversary's headquarters would not survive for long" once its location becomes known. The surviving forces would then be vulnerable to defeat in detail—military parlance for destroying an enemy piece by piece, preventing them from concentrating their strength.

This kind of warfare requires exquisite coordination. The probe might come from the Army. The analysis of the response might rely on Air Force reconnaissance. The follow-up strike might involve naval assets. Without a system to connect all these pieces, the strategy falls apart.

Teaching the Services to Speak the Same Language

In October 2020, Army Chief of Staff General James McConville sat down with Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown to hammer out how their services would work together on JADC2. They agreed to a two-year collaboration, starting, as one account put it, "at the most basic levels by defining mutual standards for data sharing and service interfacing."

This might sound like bureaucratic tedium, but it's actually crucial. Before different systems can exchange information, someone has to decide what format that information will take, what protocols will govern its transmission, and how different systems will interpret what they receive. These standards don't exist naturally. They have to be negotiated, tested, and refined.

By April 2021, the services demonstrated their ability to send data from machine to machine in front of several Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was a basic capability—machines talking to machines—but it was the prerequisite for everything else.

In July 2022, the Army's assistant secretary called for creating a large coordinating office specifically for JADC2, comparable to the existing Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aerial Systems Office. The goal would be to reconcile the requirements of Project Convergence, Project Overmatch, and the Advanced Battle Management System, ensuring they actually fit together rather than remaining separate systems that happen to share a name.

The Satellite Backbone

None of this works without space-based infrastructure. General Chance Saltzman, the head of the Space Force, describes JADC2 as conferring the capability to "move data globally at scale."

By the end of 2025, there will be 126 satellites operating with Link-16—a tactical data exchange system—forming a worldwide mesh network. This network provides the backbone for moving information from sensors to shooters regardless of where on the planet they happen to be.

The mesh architecture matters. Unlike traditional hub-and-spoke networks where everything flows through central nodes, a mesh network allows any point to communicate with any other point. If some nodes are destroyed, the network routes around them. This resilience is essential for a system that might need to function during actual combat with a major power.

The Money Problem

Ambitious military programs often die not in combat but in budget battles. By February 2024, JADC2 faced exactly this problem.

Air Force Brigadier General Luke Cropsey warned that phase two of Combined JADC2, scheduled to begin in 2024, was stalled. The culprit wasn't technical challenges or enemy action. It was Congressional budget dysfunction.

When Congress fails to pass a full budget and instead relies on Continuing Resolutions—temporary measures that keep the government funded at previous levels—new program spending gets frozen. Combined JADC2 phase two was new program spending. Without full Congressional budget approval for fiscal year 2024, it simply couldn't move forward.

This represents a peculiar vulnerability of ambitious defense programs. They can survive enemy countermeasures, technological setbacks, and inter-service rivalries. What they often cannot survive is the mundane dysfunction of American budget politics.

Looking Forward: Crewed-Uncrewed Teaming

In April 2023, the Pentagon previewed Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0—the latest iteration of its thinking about how future wars will be fought. The previous version had focused on fires (weapons effects), information, logistics, and command and control.

The new version, released in August 2023, added several concepts: winning in contested logistics (keeping forces supplied even under attack), information advantage (knowing more than the enemy), and expanded maneuver (new ways of moving forces to gain advantage).

Central to the vision is what's called crewed-uncrewed teaming—the combination of human-operated and autonomous systems working together. Drones and robots would extend the reach of human operators, gathering information and in some cases delivering effects. The challenge is making all these systems "sense and make sense" of complex situations and deliver that understanding to commanders quickly enough to matter.

In September 2023, the Army awarded a contract to Leidos to provide an electronic platform supporting JADC2—more evidence that the concept is moving from PowerPoint presentations toward actual hardware in the field.

The Integration Imperative

JADC2 represents something more than just a technology program. It's an attempt to solve one of the oldest problems in warfare: getting different forces to work together effectively.

Napoleon's genius lay partly in his ability to coordinate infantry, cavalry, and artillery better than his opponents. In World War II, the German blitzkrieg succeeded through unprecedented coordination of armor, aircraft, and infantry. The American military's dominance in the Gulf War came partly from its ability to integrate air power, ground forces, and intelligence in ways Iraq couldn't match.

Each era has had its version of the integration challenge. Each era has produced new solutions. JADC2 is this era's attempt to solve the problem at a scale and speed never before attempted.

Whether it succeeds will depend not just on technology but on organizations willing to change, budgets that materialize, and the unglamorous work of getting systems that were never designed to work together to communicate effectively. It's a project measured in decades, not years—one that will shape American military power for a generation to come.

The vision is compelling: every sensor connected to every shooter, artificial intelligence turning raw data into actionable intelligence, decisions made in seconds rather than hours. The reality will be messier, more expensive, and slower to arrive than the briefings suggest. But in a world where potential adversaries are investing in their own advanced capabilities, standing still isn't an option. The race to integrate all domains under unified command and control has already begun.