The Pentagon is “weeks away” from completing its implementation plan for the new Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy, a lead official said on Wednesday.
Army Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, the J6 deputy director and head of the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team, said the plan will detail backbone technology capabilities to drive the new concept and how initiatives such as Navy’s Project Overmatch, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System and the Army’s Project Convergence are furthering implementation efforts.
“Within it, you’ll find objectives, tasks, plans of actions and milestones that are identified in there as reflective of service contributions,” Parker said during a discussion at the virtual Defense News Conference. “As that implementation plan nears final completion, and it’s at senior-level staffing right now, I’m pretty confident that we’re close to having it hit the street [soon].”
The implementation plan, which will be released as a classified document, follows Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s approval of the larger JADC2 strategy in mid-May (Defense Daily, June 4).
Parker said a publicly releasable version of the JADC2 strategy is in the final draft stage and is also likely to be released within the next few weeks.
JADC2 is the Pentagon’s far-reaching plan to bring in joint technologies, ranging from artificial intelligence to new advanced computing tools, to build a cross-service digital architecture for future multi-domain operations.
The implementation plan will detail requirements for getting after a series of “minimally viable products” to launch JADC2, to include agile software development tools, new identity and credential access management capabilities, implementing zero trust architecture principles, transport layer systems and cloud computing, according to Parker.
“These aren’t just aspirational like we hope to get there in a few years. What the audience and others in the community can expect to see is that within 90 days we will have [initial operational capability] (IOC) for our Mission Partner Environment Secret and Below-Releasable Environments (SABRE). So we’ll have two IOC substantiations, one supporting INDOPACOM and one supporting CENTCOM,” Parker said.
Parker specifically cited the importance of the department’s new multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) effort, which replaced the canceled single-vendor JEDI cloud program as a key enabler for implementing JADC2.
“We’re very excited about that. We like multi-vendor solutions,” Parker said.
John Sherman, DoD’s acting chief information officer, said recently the department remains on track to release direct solicitation requests for the new multi-billion dollar JWCC program around Oct. 15, with awards slated to be announced next April (Defense Daily, Aug. 25).