We are honored to provide you an in-depth discussion of the most critical element to preserve our status quo, our stability in the international order and to stay ahead of the competition in making our National Defense Strategy irreversible. Decision making dominance from expediency of collection, processing and distributing machines to machines the best data to the best effective effectors from all domains is critical today in this environment and more critical in the future.
MDAA’s second virtual Congressional Roundtable was held yesterday on the future of command and control. Click here for both video and transcripts of the event.
“I think the topic that we are going to have today in the macro of Command and Control is right for that discussion across the department. I think actually, the silver lining of this COVID response that we seeing right now is the reality of forcing this distributed aspect of how we continue to get work done” – Maj. Gen. Michael A. Fantini, Acting Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration and Requirements, U.S. Air Force at MDAA’s Virtual Roundtable, “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020.
“The ability to get access to the data and information that you need and ride that data and ride those applications just like outside the Pentagon now inside to be able to enable the warfighters and all domains to be able to operate and use the information that they need where they need it rather than having to go somewhere or be in front of some particular thing to be able to achieve the mission that they need, really freeing up the warfighter to do command and control, battle management in a way that they have been able to do in their private lives, but very hamstrung in being able to do when they come to work and do their mission.” – Preston Dunlap, Chief Architect, Department of the Air Force at MDAA’s Virtual Roundtable, “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020.
“One of the, obviously, the strategic and the operational challenge for achieving that decision advantage requires that we really harness and leverage where the commercial sector is, where industry is, where tech is in terms of the ability to connect all of our sensors and our shooters and our platforms together, really, to achieve machine speed, the ability to move data, to move information, and capture it in a way that our warfighters can make sense of that and that our decision makers can then make decisions, and then, again, at the tactical edge, we can deliver some, some type of effect […] and so that’s where our link between JADC2, the Advanced Battle Management family of systems comes into play.” – Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro, Multi-Domain Command and Control Cross-Functional Team Lead, Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability, U.S. Air Force at MDAA’s Virtual Roundtable, “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020.
“Where you look at where JADC2 is trying to draw the C2 community and the ABMS program is how do you make that easier? How do you make it open up more and more standards? That’s key there because over the past 15 years, we’ve probably had about seven different portions of C2 fielding across 18 time zones to include space now and to support multiple AORs. It’s that thoroughness and engineering discipline that we have done over the years, but it’s taken time. We’re on spirals now that usually are running about two to three years. We want to do that faster in the future. We’re going to more and more of an open standards like industry has done today in the commercial world, it will allow us to integrate newer platforms faster.” – John Bier, Program Director for C2BMC, Missile Defense Agency at MDAA’s Virtual Roundtable, “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020.
“We need to have that ability to be able to pass that around, get it to the warfighters, get that capability out there so that we can actually do that mission. We need the ability to globally see, track and engage these threats in a multi-spectral environment in real time with persistent capabilities so that we can provide the right data to the right targets at right interceptors. As we go forward, we also want to be able to have the ability to challenge the threat in all phases of flight, terminal, boost, mid-course. We want to make sure that we’d be able to cover that threat spectrum as we are there. We want to impose our will on him, not give him any places that he can hide or be able to do things that we can’t see. We want to make sure that we can be able to do that throughout that entire threat trajectory, challenge him the whole way. As we look at this, we’re looking at an architecture that’s flexible, agile, resilient, all those factors that we’re talking about in the JADC2, or the Joint All-Domain Command and Control, that we need there” – Stan Stafira, Jr., Chief Architect, Missile Defense Agency at MDAA’s Virtual Roundtable, “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020.
“It’s not a technological challenge. It seems to me it’s more of an organizational leadership challenge to bring together the right cards to avoid the stove pipe issues we’ve had before and get the true goodness that we’ve achieved” – John Rood, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. MDAA Virtual Roundtable “The Future of Command and Control” on May 13, 2020
