A member of the 321st Contingency Response Squadron security team stands next to a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 prototype during the Advanced Battle Management System exercise on Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, Sept. 1, 2020. (US Air Force)

As we watch Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine and China's ongoing efforts to slice away neighboring territories in the South China Sea, now is the time for the U.S. military to revise and update its long-standing views on warfare and battlefield capabilities, according to a new report by Hudson Senior Fellows Bryan Clark and Dan Patt. 

In “One-Size-Fits-None: Overhauling JADC2 to Prioritize the Warfighter and Exploit Adversaries’ Weaknesses,” Clark and Patt examine how the U.S. Department of Defense over relies on centralized decision-making and universally applicable solutions that underperform on the battlefield. To create a resilient joint force, the Pentagon's JADC2 initiative must adapt to the information age by refocusing on the military's ultimate customer, the combatant commander, and by leveraging digital tools that respond directly to front-line operational challenges.

See below for key takeaways from their research, and sign up for our Re: Ukraine newsletter for the latest on how the U.S. and allies can support Ukraine.

Key Takeaways

1. Five Recommendations for the US Military

The Department of Defense should pursue the following recommendations:

1. Increase Combatant Command Input: Combatant commands should identify their most pressing operational challenges and begin developing joint plays to address them. Armed with even a rough analysis of their needs, combatant commanders could identify to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and to mission managers (if assigned) the specific additional forces they need and the new or modified capabilities that would help them achieve acceptable performance or improved optionality.
    
2. Prioritize Key Operational Challenges: The Joint Staff should abandon attempts to set unaffordable and unachievable universal requirements for JADC2 and instead work with combatant commander—primarily U.S. European Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command—to identify their key operational challenges, prioritize them across theaters, and help assess the most advantageous plays to address them. 
    
3. Reexamine Existing Force Packages: Services should continue their efforts to assess useful force compositions through experimentation and identify the interoperability measures needed to enable joint integration. These efforts, however, should be designed around the operational challenges faced by combatant commanders rather than service equities. Services should examine their existing force packages to determine if they are helping or hindering the cause of joint integration.
    
4. Fund Integration Capabilities: Combat support agencies should take the lead and be funded within the DoD for developing the horizontal capabilities that underpin joint integration. For example, decision-support tools like ACK or RSPACE and interoperability tools including STITCHES and DyNAMO came from DARPA; air defense effects chains like that for GPI are led by the Missile Defense Agency; the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and Defense Intelligence Agency are developing widely applicable algorithms such as Project Maven for COA development and intelligence analysis.
    
5. Support Mission Management Pilot Programs: DoD leaders should embrace the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Mission Management pilot directed by the FY2022 NDAA and build on it by establishing a mission manager for U.S. European Command and begin identifying key operational problems to be solved in that theater. Insights from mission management pilots should directly inform DoD’s proposed European and Pacific Deterrence Initiative investments in the FY2024 budget request.

2. Shifting DoD's Industrial Model to the Information Age

The assumptions underlying the Department of Defense’s industrial model of top-down capability development are no longer valid. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command assesses that China could mount a successful invasion of Taiwan during the 2020s, and Russia continues to threaten imminent action against NATO’s eastern members. Combatant commanders’ perspectives on capability requirements should therefore be a top priority for services, agencies, and the defense industry.

At the same time, in the commercial sector, computing, manufacturing, and materials technologies are delivering new products within months or several years rather than decades. New defense industrial base entrants that leverage commercial advancements and software-centric innovation could quickly provide relevant capabilities by responding directly to combatant commander’s current and emerging operational challenges.

3. Creating a Resilient and Recomposable Force

The U.S. military’s growing reliance on automation and machine-to-machine communication is not simply a consequence of being overtaken by commercial trends. Rather, it is a response to improving Chinese and Russian capabilities as well as the proliferation of high-end military systems to regional and non-state adversaries.

As suggested by Pentagon leaders’ statements on expanded maneuver and explicitly described in Mosaic Warfare and Decision-Centric Warfare concepts, the ability of home-team powers like China and Russia to contest the surface, air, and space around their territory will require U.S. forces to employ changing compositions and tactics—disaggregating to be resilient and reaggregating to mass effects—so as to create uncertainty and dissuade adversaries. Achieving a more recomposable force will require functionally disaggregating military capabilities to smaller manned units and unmanned systems that leverage machine-to-machine collaboration between equipment, software, and platforms.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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