Written by Brandi Vincent
Attempts to achieve the Pentagon’s ambitious plans to enable the military’s next-generation command and control architecture should be prioritized, according to the Space Force’s former technology and innovation chief.
The Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept aims to connect and operate all sensors, launchers, and associated assets across the organization—on land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities to help service members make more informed decisions faster. Awards are continually being made to enable this new way of doing things, but the concept is still in its infancy and the Pentagon has a long way to go.
“JADC2 — I think it’s going to keep a lot of people up at night because it’s a huge opportunity. We all see it. It’s like we can taste it,” Kim Kreider told FedScope in an interview Wednesday. “Just being able to do that gives us such an advantage. We’ve invested a lot in all of these capabilities and we want to be able to maximize our ability to use them. So, everybody wants to do this. We’ve been talking about this for a long time.
Now the managing director of AI innovation for national security and defense at Deloitte, Kreider is a retired Air Force major general who most recently served as the Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer after serving as the Air Force’s chief information officer. Drawing on her diverse experiences in and out of government, Kreider sheds light on the many obstacles DOD must face to enable JADC2, and why she thinks experiments should be at the forefront of the approach for all parties involved.
“Overcoming challenges through cultural and technical experimentation is really key. There are challenges on both sides,” she said. “So, let’s do some experiments. Let’s work with these capabilities and work both sides of the problem.
The technology has come so far to do this.’
Kreider has decades of experience dealing with many of the technologies and challenges associated with today’s JADC2 efforts.
“I spent 35 years in uniform,” she said. “I didn’t know I’d be around for 35 years, but one thing led to another.”
Educated and trained as an engineer, Kreider began her career in the Air Force’s large-scale systems acquisition and engineering group. “It was really my passion to figure out how to bring people and technology together to create greater efficiency,” she said.
Eight years later, she moved into Operations Communications. There in the field, she explained, “I have the responsibility of thinking about how I can take these systems that someone like me is providing in my previous job and make them work properly.” Kreider served all over the world – in the Pacific, Europe and elsewhere. Much of the service was focused on helping the military deploy secure communications and conduct cyber operations, she said.
“So I was on the ground floor, fortunately, establishing defensive and offensive cyber operations across the Army. Air Force.” [played] A leading role in this,” Kreider said.
From there, she stepped out as a standby uniform to help defense-related companies understand those cybersecurity approaches and implement large-scale technology implementations.
Eventually, she moved from a cyber focus to data and analytics.
“I was the Air Force’s chief data officer because I had experience from industry, again how you use data to solve problems in the environments you’re trying to protect,” Kreider said. “One thing led to another, and that brought me back to the space community, if you will, which was really the big new frontier.”
Space power satellites, ground systems and other capabilities will be necessary to make JADC2 a reality.
“Technology has come so far to allow us to do this. The challenges we have are, in some ways, technical.” “It means that not all of our assets can talk to each other,” Kreider explained. That’s a fact.”
DOD experts and industry partners are figuring out how to make data translations, have more open interfaces between systems, and apply capabilities like AI and machine learning to better coordinate and optimize the availability of specific assets across multiple domains to perform specific tasks. Still, at this point, “we’re not fully engaged,” Kreider said.
She also pointed out that JADC2 has provided funding for operational challenges that remain unaddressed.
Currently, the military’s networks consist of many outdated components and outdated capabilities, she said, and are “still very slow.” In her view, the government has failed to make all the necessary investments in advanced cloud-based infrastructure to support planned, ultra-fast networks and computing solutions that must be included in all different domains.
“We have different networks on the ground, in the air and in space – and being able to pull them all together takes some investment. We’ve invested heavily in amazing assets over the years, and we’ve got the best assets money can buy. Now, we’re bringing all these assets together in a more effective and efficient way.” “We need to invest more in the infrastructure that it takes to mobilize,” Kreider said.
Having served in a number of military and industry roles, she has seen many of the structural barriers associated with implementing JADC2. The former Air Force and Space Force executive said the DOD “is still organized as service-level furnaces,” with specific capabilities being tailored to the needs of specific military branches. Although there are some good reasons for doing it this way, most military technologies do not work seamlessly across all services.
“We have to work through some of the organizational challenges that allow that cross-domain integration, cross-domain capability to be universal and useful,” Kreider said. “Those are going to be big challenges, and I think there are certainly ways to overcome that. Efforts are being made to move in a positive direction.
Still, she urged that more trial-and-error efforts be conducted early and often by those involved in this complex push to JADC2.
“Testing is a big part of it, because we’ve never done another test quite like this before,” Kreider said.
‘We are learning’
The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) is a key component underpinning the Pentagon’s plan to mobilize information across all domains of warfare. The Army’s Project Fusion and the Navy’s Project Overmatch are contributing to the JADC2 effort.
“In the early days of ABMS, we saw the value of testing,” Kreider said.
She reiterated that there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure seamless integration of ABMS across the Air Force and Space Force as well as other services. The initiative, however, provides a starting point for engaged dialogue between services at departmental level.
Officials involved in developing the ABMS noted the immediate importance of having the Air Force and Space Force teams test the structure and its associated components during the early stages of development. Eventually, military and naval assets also began to converge. Experimenting with different service partners and combining their capabilities with new technologies like AI has resulted in different courses of action to enable some integration. So joint commanders will have options to do more.
“The more we can do with these types of experiments, the more we can see what those opportunities are and what technologies give us the most value for money,” Kreider said.
In wars over the past decade, the military services have fought together — but brought the assets separately and then figured out how to make them all work together. JADC2 is set to pave the way for what Kreider dubs “the fusion of technical design and culture” across its services, with interoperability already baked in.
“How are we going to do it, no joke, all the way through a joint capability set, command and control? We’re learning. We’ve definitely evolved. We’re definitely doing better than we’ve been doing — but we’ve got to keep working through all these challenges,” she said. We must continue.
Kreider is no stranger to overcoming tough national security challenges. For the first time in 70 years, she reflected on some of the problems associated with establishing a new military service — the Space Force — to improve America’s space capabilities and operations.
I said to my fellow workers: ‘Look, men, these are hard days. I know we all work extremely long hours here and are under a lot of pressure. But we are making history every day. We are literally making history – because what we do today was not done yesterday… so be proud of that. Be proud that every day you’re putting a new step on the ladder to where this is going,'” Kreider said.
While the Pentagon has a long and rocky road to implementing its JADC2 vision, to scale AI and prepare for next-generation computing, among other technology priorities, Kreider is “absolutely confident” the US will “win” in this effort.
“We figure out how to do that and we’re going to continue to be the best in the world because we have people who are really committed and committed to the mission and the security of our nation and our allies. They’re an important part of making sure we can keep the world safe,” she said.
