The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is pushing the Defense Department (DoD) to create a framework that will guide investments in its Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) project and warned of trouble ahead if it does not do so.
If DoD fails to provide that kind of a framework, GAO warned, military service branches will continue to pursue their own command and control projects “largely in isolation” and slow down progress toward the larger CJACD2 goals.
The Pentagon began work in 2019 on CJACD2 (formerly called JADC2), which is DoD’s approach to providing commanders with an information and decision-making advantage by connecting U.S. systems across all warfighting domains – land, sea, air, space, and cyber.
In its new report out today, GAO said DoD “has attempted to define and guide CJADC2 efforts since its inception,” but that the Pentagon “has yet to build a framework that can guide CJADC2-related investments across DoD or track progress toward its goals.”
“As the CJADC2 concept has taken shape, military departments and other DoD entities have concurrently pursued their own independent data integration capabilities,” GAO said.
“In the absence of clear direction, warfighting entities will continue to pursue their command and control projects largely in isolation, which will likely result in achieving CJADC2 much more slowly and inefficiently, if at all,” GAO found.
Below that top-line concern, GAO reported that “DoD is conducting activities aimed at demonstrating selected capabilities, but there is limited awareness of experimentation lessons learned that could lead to duplicative efforts and slower progress toward CJADC2 goals.”
“Further, GAO found several critical challenges to achieving CJADC2 that DoD has yet to formally identify and address,” GAO said, including “overly restrictive data classification” that poses “a significant hindrance to sharing command and control data.”
The watchdog agency said it spoke with military officials who “were not aware of an entity working on a solution to this or several other critical challenges.” Additionally, GAO said, CJADC2 leadership said that “addressing these challenges was beyond their purview.”
“Without identifying and addressing key challenges, DoD’s progress toward its CJADC2 objectives will remain limited,” GAO concluded.
According to GAO, DoD mostly concurred with the watchdog’s three new recommendations, which urge the Defense Secretary to: “(1) develop a framework for CJADC2 that helps guide investments and measures progress; (2) devise a mechanism for sharing lessons learned; and (3) identify and address key challenges in achieving its CJADC2 goals.”