Unlocking the Force: The Real Stakes of JADC2
During the fall series of defense conferences, companies will pitch a concept of operations that provide a "single pane of glass" over the battlefield, many insisting that a singular program will finally unite America's sensors and shooters. It's a compelling pitch, but often beneath the marketing sits a technical and moral obligation the Pentagon cannot keep deferring – connecting the forces that underwrite global security.
For two decades, the Pentagon has pursued what’s come to be known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), linking every service's sensors and shooters so data reaches warfighters in time to matter, regardless of who built the radar, jet or software. The vision isn't new nor are the challenges of resilient networking, edge processing and standardized interfaces that can finally make it real. What is missing is the enforcement of engineering discipline to build a truly open system and fielding capability to service members who depend on these systems working together under fire.
Since 2019, the Air Force, Army and Navy secretaries have declared open standards "vital to our success" and mandated their inclusion in weapons systems requirements. It's now federal law under Title 10 that major defense programs use a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to the maximum extent practicable. Speaking at the "Right to Integrate" hackathon in May, former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll put a finer point on the issue noting, “The war in Ukraine showed the world that speed matters and an open architecture construct is highly effective in high-intensity warfare.”
Such modularity already has a foothold in fielded technology. SNC's AWARE, for instance, is a deployable connectivity and computing unit that draws on satellite links, Link-16, TTNT and other tactical networks simultaneously, shifting automatically between them if one degrades, while plugging into a platform's existing mission systems rather than replacing them. It's a reminder that the hard part of CJADC2 isn't inventing the technology, increasingly, it's enforcing the standards that let systems like it interoperate with others.
CJADC2 depends on getting unglamorous technical layers right: standardized data formats, certified interface control documents and open APIs that don't lock sensor or shooter data inside one vendor's proprietary stack. Every time a program accepts a closed interface to hit a schedule milestone it reintroduces the brittle, single-vendor dependency CJADC2 was meant to eliminate, now wrapped in a modern dashboard.
To give the law teeth, Congress and the Pentagon should treat MOSA compliance as a funded, staffed and technically audited requirement that includes the cost-benefit analysis GAO identified as missing and shields technical‑architecture offices from being raided each budget cycle.
"Open architecture" needs a real, independently verified audit standard, applied evenly to legacy primes and emerging defense challengers alike, tested against reference architectures like SOSA and CMOSS. Every major CJADC2-relevant contract should require verified conformance with data rights structured so no single company's system becomes the mandatory gateway for the rest of the force. And, finally, the Intellectual Property (IP) Cadre Congress already directed the Pentagon to build should be fully empowered to negotiate that leverage upfront.
Tradeshow floors will keep selling connectivity as easy to solve. If it is, we need to start with enforceable standards. We owe our forces and the global security they sustain a resilient network engineered using the principles of open standards. The next war will not pause while the Pentagon sorts out whose plug fits whose socket.
By Tom Andersen
Major General Tom Andersen, USAF, ret., serves as senior vice president of Washington operations at Sierra Nevada Company (SNC), where he leads company activities across the National Capital Region.