The chief information officer (CIO) within the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) said today that the Defense Department’s (DoD) Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series is working towards demonstrating “the ultimate example” of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) by the end of 2025.
The CDAO relaunched the GIDE series in January 2023 with GIDE 5, expanding collaboration across combatant commands and international partners. The series is an experiment that happens every 90 days to iteratively test, measure, optimize, and field CJADC2 solutions that create a unified data layer that is vendor agnostic.
“We are in the next series – coming up in the next couple of months – building up to a worldwide joint activity where we’re going to have a carrier strike group that the Brits are going to take and cross three different U.S. [Combatant Commands] and four different international partners on the trip out, and then three different [Combatant Commands] and international partners on the trip back,” the CDAO’s CIO Daniel Holtzman said during a Defense One event in D.C. today. “That is the ultimate example of JADC2.”
“How do we sail that fleet through this partner – that wasn’t a partner yesterday – that’s now a partner and needs to connect to us,” Holtzman said. “We are pushing the bounds … JADC2 isn’t a thing – it’s a result, and so we are pushing in GIDE all of those different inventive ways to do that.”
CJADC2 – one of the Pentagon’s top modernization priorities – is a warfighting concept that aims to connect military assets, such as data sensors and other communications devices, across all warfighting domains.
The Pentagon’s CJADC2 strategy envisions a network to share sensor data across land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace forces to enable better and faster decisions, using technologies such as AI, machine learning, and edge computing.
Holtzman said the GIDE experiment he is describing to reach the ultimate example of CJADC2 will take place at the end of 2025.
“We have some planning cycles. What we are doing in the next GIDE is a series of experiments that all lead up to that activity,” the CIO said. “We’re connecting international partners – UK, Australia, and others – in ways in the cloud that we’ve prototyped that are pushing the bounds on certain things that get to that underlying data.”
Since relaunching GIDE in 2023, the CDAO has held six series with international partners leveraging generative AI, ML, and other advanced data capabilities.
Earlier this year, the DoD announced that it had achieved a minimum viable capability of CJADC2 in its final GIDE series of 2023.
“CJADC2 isn’t a platform, or a single system. It’s a fusion of concepts, technologies, policies, tools, and talent that’s advancing how we command and control forces with key allies and partners,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in February.
“The minimum viable capability for CJADC2 is real and ready now. It’s low latency, and extremely reliable,” Hicks said.
