The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) data-sharing strategy is currently undergoing a “posture review” to review current gaps and vulnerabilities as part of its implementation phase, a DoD official said June 21.
Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, director for Command, Control, Communication, and Computers/Cyber and CIO for the J-6 Joint Staff, said the posture review, similar to a common gap analysis, is helping determine what investments to make, after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed off on the plan last month.
“We have more gaps than we can cover … and despite all the capability that we have, there’s a pretty long list of things that we believe we need to improve upon and really fulfill,” Crall said at the Defense One Tech Summit. “So, it starts with making sure you’ve got the right priority. So prioritizing those gaps is what the joint staff does fairly well.”
“We don’t like to reveal some of our weaknesses in these areas, but you could imagine where some of these might lie,” Crall said.
Crall said that while the gap analysis will be, predictably, classified, he gave some clues as to where some of those currently exist. He mentioned potential conflicting architectures among the different services, the need to focus on development, security, and operation, and operating programs at scale. Crall said that the Joint Chiefs are also looking to prioritize areas where there is prior momentum.
“That’s what we would be looking at in the implementation plan,” Crall said. “Where are investments going to be, we don’t want to just pick a single winner. We’ve got several in almost every one of these categories that have gaps in that we would like to experiment with breaking, learn from, iterate, and then maybe pick the best winners once we find their performance under pressure.”
Crall said that once the posture review is completed the full implementation plan will need to be documented to show the tasks needed to complete as well as the milestones any involved parties need to meet.
