‘Ultimate example of JADC2’: Can the Pentagon keep a carrier connected on long-range voyage?

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s push to share battle data amongst US and allied forces worldwide, known as CJDAC2, is going on tour in 2025.

Starting “in the next couple of months,” a senior official said, the quarterly Global Information Dominance Experiments will lay the groundwork for an extra-ambitious GIDE in late 2025: The US and at least four foreign allies will try to keep an aircraft carrier and its escorts continuously connected on the high seas as they sail through waters overseen by at least three different US theater combatant commands.

“We’re going to have a carrier strike group [sail] across three different US COCOMS and four different international partners on the trip out, and then three different COCOMS and international partners on the trip back,” said Daniel Holtzman, the chief information officer for the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Officer, who oversees GIDE.

“That is the ultimate example of CJADC2,” Holtzman told a Defense One event this morning, referring to the Pentagon mega-project formally known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control .

The baseline aspiration of CJADC2 is to connect far-flung forces — on the sea, in the air, on land, in space, and in cyberspace, the “domains” — across the US services (“joint”) and allied militaries (“combined”). That’s proving hard enough, although Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has publicly announced a baseline version was “real and ready now” as of the beginning of the year.

The 2025 exercise will take that up another notch: It’s trying to plug-and-play new partners quickly, without the ponderous bureaucratic processes and awkward technical kludges that characterized multinational military networks in conflicts like Afghanistan.

“How do we sail that fleet through this partner that wasn’t a partner yesterday, that’s now a partner who needs to connect to us, [when] we don’t have a year and a half to … get it installed and get it authorized?” Holtzman asked. “We’re connecting international partners — UK, Australia, and others —  in ways, in the cloud, that we prototyped, that are pushing the bounds.”

Ultimately, “I want the universal translator. I want the Star Trek computer so i can just ask it a question,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”

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As tricky as the tech itself can get, however, the biggest obstacle is often bureaucratic politics and process. “It’s a very complex political problem, I think the tech is the easy part,” Holtzman said. “How do we share the data?” How do we get through what I’m going to call the policy folklore” – the culture of unwritten expectations and extra precautions that go beyond what official regulations actually require.

Sometimes that means just saying “no” to someone who’s trying to say “no” to new ideas.  “When people say you can’t do something,” Holtzman said that he shoots back with, “I’m an authorizing official [and] I report directly to the SecDef [Secretary of Defense]. I don’t see you in that chain of command. Feel free to go talk to my boss.’”

That said, Holtzman doesn’t see the naysayers as villains, just as trapped in bad habits and outdated assumptions. “Everybody’s trying to do the right thing. Their motive is right, their desire is right, but [for them] the most important thing [is] protect the data — don’t share it, protect it,” he said. “Our goal is the mission, and that shift in thinking is what we’re trying to do [in] GIDEs.”

Part of that shift is getting civilian officials and IT experts to think more like combat troops, Holtzman argued. “Our warfighters are very, very good at being very inventive, and they understand risk because they’re trained, they have solid foundations, they know when they need to deviate [from standard procedures],” he said. “We don’t operate in that way in the cloud with data, and we’re trying to get to that point where we can.”

Being flexible may also require changes to the plan for upcoming Global Information Dominance Experiments, whose 90-day cycle makes it hard for many Defense Department organizations to keep up. “It’s very hectic, and even though it happens every quarter, we kind of don’t realize until, like, a month before the quarter [ends],” Holtzman said wryly. “They change… We could publish, ‘we’re going to do this a GIDE, you know, four months from now,’ and it’s totally different.”