Future Warfare: Different Platforms Should Work Together

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Although each of the US military services – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard – has different tasks, they all have to be interconnected in order to coordinate operations. With each military service developing its own concept for the Pentagon’s joint war-fighting plan, known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the different branches will have to connect their systems and make sure they are able to communicate. 

US Army labs will provide space for the joint services to test how different platforms work together. The Army’s experimental labs will serve as the central laboratory for integrating the military services’ disparate joint war-fighting systems as the services seek to connect sensors and shooters for future wars.

The Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) labs run by the C5ISR Center there will connect with other service labs across the US working on joint war-fighting concepts, which will be used to run experiments in virtualized environments once connected. 

Those connections are important as the Army looks to include other military services in Project Convergence 21, a demonstration of the Army’s contributions to joint warfighting. While last year’s Project Convergence largely focused on connecting different Army assets, in 2021 the service wants to connect the Army’s system with other services. Army officers working on Project Convergence have said that the Air Force, Marines and Navy have committed to participating this year, as reported by c4isrnet.com.

Lab work between the Army and the Air Force, facilitated by C5ISR Center labs at APG, has successfully established a data-sharing connection in one joint use case.

C5ISR Center is currently working on new infrastructure within a warehouse-like space at APG to accommodate joint partners and manage the increased need for integration tests.