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With the war in Afghanistan in the rearview mirror, US military planners are trying to pivot toward a very different set of challenges than fighting the Taliban. Competition with what Department of Defense officials have commonly called “near peers” presents a set of new challenges to a military that has been focused for the past two decades on counterinsurgencies and terrorism. The United States wants to maintain its ability to respond to nonstate, “asymmetric” adversaries while also figuring out how to fight countries that are America’s technological equals.
In the synopsis of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, DOD officials laid out the problems: an ascending China looking for “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future” and an ambitious Russia seeking “to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor”—with both nations using information warfare and modernized conventional and nuclear forces to flex their muscles. This makes for a vastly different adversary than the kind the United States has been fighting for the last 20 years.
Responding to China’s rapidly growing air and naval forces will require more than just better ships and aircraft, too; the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) air force and navy are in many ways newer than their US counterparts and increasingly similar in capability. There’s also the matter of the US being able to manage forces in an electromagnetically hostile environment—full of jamming, active countermeasures, and potential intrusion and disruption of military networks by other means. The Taliban didn’t have the capability to engage in sophisticated electronic warfare against the US—but China and Russia absolutely do.
To meet these challenges, the Department of Defense is aiming to make operations all “joint.” That means tearing down the walls between the various US armed services’ C4ISR systems (that unwieldy acronym stands for “Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance”). The idea is to allow commanders in all branches of the military to have a galaxy-mind view of all levels of the battlefield—physical, electromagnetic, and “cyber effects.” This creates a better “connected battlespace.”
Specifically, the DOD would like to attain “Joint All-Domain Command and Control,” or “JADC2” (which one pronounces “jad-see-two”). The vision for JADC2 is a distributed network for data sharing and targeting that links every friendly sensor in the battlefield with decision makers regarding what to shoot and where—whether it’s network defense, a “cyber effect,” or a weapon on a ship or an aircraft or a drone.
Into the wild blue yonder
In this piece, we’ll talk a bit about the air combat implications and how the JADC2 vision works with the Air Force—primarily because the Air Force’s Advanced Battlefield Management System is the most fully formed of the DOD’s JADC2 efforts so far. Conceptually, ABMS is an “Internet of things” that fuses data from fighter aircraft, drones, air defense sensors, and other supporting systems into a single stream of info that (notionally, at least) speeds up decisions and actions. So far, ABMS is mostly a technology demonstration (though largely a successful one), with successful communications tests and exercises simulating a cruise missile attack and a Russian threat in the Black Sea. But in its fully realized form, ABMS would build upon capabilities that have already been demonstrated by existing command-and-control systems, allowing all Air Force-y things in a given combat area to act together as a decentralized sensor and weapons network. It’s sort of like a cloud deployment, except that the cloud is made up of fighter jets and their systems.
The goal of this massive fusion of all command and control (and everything else) is to help counter the “anti-access / area denial” capabilities being developed by China and Russia. Those capabilities include hypersonic long-range carrier-killer weapons, the militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea, and cyber warfare. Many of these capabilities are aimed squarely at preventing the US from using carrier groups and other means the DOD has long relied on to project America’s military power far from home. In the world of JADC2, “air battles” or “sea battles” no longer exist—just one battle focused on very specific objectives, and forces would be deployed in a coordinated fashion to reach those objectives as one.
Air University, the JADC2 concept would face huge challenges if China invaded Taiwan and the US was forced to respond. To be truly effective, the networks that JADC2 relies on will have to be resistant to detection and jamming but also have the smarts built in to squeeze massive amounts of sensor, intelligence, and command-and-control data into just what’s needed to effectively make decisions and fight battles.
EA-18G Growler, an electronic warfare aircraft based on the FA-18 Super Hornet. The Growler’s job is to jam enemy radars, mess with their communications, suppress their air defenses, and launch radar-guided missiles at whatever it sees.”>/ An aviator climbs aboard an EA-18G Growler, an electronic warfare aircraft based on the FA-18 Super Hornet. The Growler’s job is to jam enemy radars, mess with their communications, suppress their air defenses, and launch radar-guided missiles at whatever it sees.
“While high-level integration is a logical goal, JADC2 as a stand-alone is a technically infeasible solution in a China-Taiwan scenario given Chinese capabilities that are designed to degrade or deny US networks and systems of systems,” wrote Capt. Esther Yoon. “[T]he most robust and durable communications systems will not withstand the sheer magnitude of kinetic and non-kinetic effects directed at them… and while the goal of linking various kill chain nodes seamlessly is sound, it should not be the end in itself.”
Doubts have come from the top as well. Though there has been no change in policy on JADC2 as the administrations change, there have been budget cuts. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall is looking at redirecting the program away from the open systems architecture the ABMS program has emphasized toward a focus “on specific operational return on investment,” he told Defense News in an August interview.
Another challenge: pulling off the vision of an “open” system like JADC2 in the world of military procurement, which tends to go astray when not purchasing specific products. Previous programs, like the JTRS radio family and the Distributed Ground System (and the F-35, for that matter) have ended up in the weeds because of service-specific needs, overspecification of standards, and constantly changing requirements. But focusing on point products instead of a fully unified system could end up making things worse if the process isn’t properly managed.
Whatever form ABMS and JADC2 take, they will inevitably change how the Air Force (and DOD as a whole) plan and carry out air missions. To understand what that change might look like, let’s look at what the Air Force has tried to do so far, both in technology and in doctrine.
“F-22 has joined the chat”
Just getting everything to talk to each other is a significant hurdle, which is why the Air Force’s earliest tests related to ABMS were largely focused on getting systems speaking a common language based on the Unified Data Library, a cloud API for exchanging information across military and commercial systems. That means having some way for the proprietary networks associated with existing aircraft to communicate—the F-22 and F-35, for example, have not been able to share data directly other than through rudimentary data links.
right angles reflect radar waves back at their source, so if you want good stealth characteristics, you avoid them.”>/ An F-22 Raptor. Note the “sawtooth” edging and lack of right angles where body panels connect—right angles reflect radar waves back at their source, so if you want good stealth characteristics, you avoid them.
