Developing a Concept

of Operations for Joint

All-Domain Command
and Control with an
Embedded Role for Artificial
Intelligence Applications

Sherrill Lingel
Senior Engineer, RAND Corporation

B
efore one can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning
(ML) for multi-domain operations (MDOs) as part of Joint All-Domain
Command and Control (JADC2), one must do the grunt work of laying
an “information foundation.” Laying this foundation—in which data are tagged,
securely stored and transported, and easily accessible—requires the mundane
and ongoing work of organizing and safeguarding all the information the mil-
itary needs for C2 across domains, services, and echelons. This same body of
information will be the input for AI and ML algorithms. Absent such an informa-
tion foundation, little progress can be made.

Although recent successes in AI/ML have been encouraging in the field of gam-
ing, employing similar techniques for some C2 functions will remain challenging
given the real-world barriers of incomplete information, poor data quality, and
adversary actions. Other AI/ML techniques, such as those for predicting the status
of aircraft in theater, will be more readily applicable. Reaching JADC2 goals will
depend on both identifying the C2 needs of core military mission sets and estab-
lishing software development plans that are achievable in the near and far terms.

1
 Fall 2021: MDO, AI and IW

The remainder of this paper describes the need for JADC2 with embedded AI/
ML, offers a cautionary note about the lure of AI/ML, outlines the AI/ML barriers
to overcome, and suggests a path forward. In general, investments in people
and resources will be needed to move beyond today’s man-power intensive C2
paradigm. Improving upon current planning processes with automation and
some AI/ML is a realistic goal that is worthy of working toward.

Given the increased complexity of MDO planning, the reduced

timescales, and the greater data requirements, military planners
will require new tools, including those based on AI/ML.

The Need for JADC2 in Support of MDO

Modern warfare has expanded beyond the traditional domains of land, air, and
sea, requiring military commanders and their staffs to plan, command, and con-
trol forces not only in these traditional domains but also now in those of space
and cyber and across the electromagnetic spectrum. To complicate matters
further, activities across all these domains have expanded beyond traditional
warfare to shape the competitive environment in which most nations live to-
day—prior to open hostilities. A military must be able to integrate across these
domains not only in warfare, but also in competition. Today’s military operations
already require resilient and secure means of communicating and sharing data
across echelons, domains, organizations, and geographic regions. Tomorrow’s
all-domain warfare and competition will place even higher premiums on the
scale and speed of access to information, on understanding that information,
and on rapid decisionmaking—key elements of an effective JADC2 capability
(Lingel et al., 2020).

However, today’s legacy systems and infrastructure for planning, scheduling,

and execution monitoring military missions are incongruent with the modern,
all-domain world in which militaries must compete. Given the increased com-
plexity of MDO planning, the reduced timescales, and the greater data require-
ments, military planners will require new tools, including those based on AI/ML.

2
 Developing a Concept of Operations for Joint All-Domain Command

A proper prioritization of investment in these tools requires an understanding

of their capabilities, their barriers, and their potential fulfillment of the emerging
C2 needs for MDOs.

Types of Machine Learning

1 2 3
SUPERVISED UNSUPERVISED REINFORCED

Task-Driven Data-Driven AI-Driven

Machine is made Machine Positive and

to learn explicitly understands negative
with feedback data reinforcement

Clearly defined Identifies structures Self-learning

data and outputs and patterns –
stipulated clustering

Resolves Deep Reacts to

classification and learning environment
regression

The Lure of Artificial Intelligence/Machine

Learning (AI/ML)

The appeal of AI/ML stems in part from recent demonstrations of AI/ML systems
achieving super-human performance in increasingly complex games, com-
bined with growing recognition of the operational demands of future high-end

3
 Fall 2021: MDO, AI and IW

conflicts. The recent success of AlphaStar, an AI/ML system trained to play the
real-time strategy game StarCraft, hints at future applications of supervised and
reinforcement learning for tactical and operational C2.1 However, significant re-
search is still needed to transition these technologies from gaming to warfight-
ing.

All-domain warfare and competition will place even higher pre-

miums on the scale and speed of access to information, on un-
derstanding that information, and on rapid decisionmaking

As AI algorithms are developed for real-world, dynamic, multi-domain, large-

scale, and high-tempo operations, important metrics will need to be selected,
evaluated, and monitored to gauge algorithm performance, effectiveness, and
suitability. Key algorithm metrics will include the following: efficiency (the time
and memory needed to compute), soundness (whether the algorithm produc-
es valid results), optimality (whether the algorithm provides a best result for a
given objective), robustness (whether the algorithm degrades gracefully under
unanticipated cases), explainability (whether a human can understand the “why”
of the results), and assuredness (whether the algorithm operates as intended)
(Walsh et al., 2021).

Because there is no direct application of commercial and academic AI/ML sys-

tems to military missions, the technologies will need to be transitioned to a
military setting before they can provide an operational advantage. To decide
which AI/ML technologies to pursue, the military must first understand the op-
erational demands the technologies will need to support (e.g., air superiority, air
defense, tanker support, etc.). The operational demands will then determine the
C2 processes (e.g., situational awareness, airspace deconfliction, etc.) needed
to enable the operational missions. Understanding the limitations of the AI/ML
technologies, particularly the difficulty they encounter in reasoning under con-

1 Reinforcement, supervised, and unsupervised learning are three types of ML. Reinforcement learning
algorithms learn from mistakes by trial and error.

4
 Developing a Concept of Operations for Joint All-Domain Command

ditions of uncertainty, will be equally important.2 Otherwise, the technologies

may fall short of expectations.

DATA SCIENCE

ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE

MACHINE
LEARNING

DEEP
LEARNING

ARTIFICIAL
NEURAL NET WORKS

AI/ML Barriers to Overcome

Several barriers to realizing the promise of AI/ML for military applications ex-
ist. One barrier is military culture, which is often risk-averse (lives are at risk) in
contrast with that of the commercial world, where taking big risks can pay big
monetary rewards. A related cultural difference is in sharing data. The military
tends to be concerned with securing information (for only those with “the need
to know”), whereas the commercial world values open access to data (“sharing
widely”) for application development and other monetary benefits. Therefore, it
will be important to incorporate security concerns in military software develop-
ment and information technology (IT) operations—known as DevSecOps—to
thwart adversaries and bad actors who might seek to degrade C2 through cyber
means. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges not yet fully faced is to ensure

2 Algorithms are challenged by situations where there are: (1) incomplete information; (2) noisy inputs;
and (3) a lack of historical data or a suitable simulation environment to train from.

5
 Fall 2021: MDO, AI and IW

the suitability of AI/ML algorithms for real-world military situations in which the
“fog of war,” incomplete information, and adversary actions represent distinct
contrasts from a gaming environment.

Another barrier is data inaccessibility within the military itself. To move forward,
the military will need a unified data management policy and sufficient IT to
make large amounts of data accessible to C2 forces to support their AI-assisted
decisionmaking. In other words, there must be an AI ecosystem that supports
collecting, tagging, storing, securing, and sharing data. This ecosystem will rely
on common data standards, clearly designated authorities, integrity checks, and
intrusion safeguards. Cloud computing and data lakes will be key components.
A cloud-based data lake can be leveraged for distributed computing, redundant
storage, and enterprise-wide connectivity. Building out an environment like this
to provide large amounts of data in a secure way across domains and security
levels will present challenges for JADC2 given existing military policies, cultures,
authorities, budgets, and acquisition paths.

A third barrier is the need to restructure military operations centers and the
training of personnel who run them. An increase in machine-to-machine com-
munication, combined with the automation of C2 processes, will likely induce
both physical changes and staffing changes in the operations centers, freeing
up human operators to engage in more cognitive tasks, such as evaluating and
refining potential courses of action. The adoption of AI/ML technologies will
create new roles and responsibilities. Operators will need to be trained to man-
age and navigate the AI ecosystem, all while acting as responsible data stew-
ards to ensure the quality and completeness of the data captured and stored in
that ecosystem. Additionally, whereas planners and decisionmakers of today are
trained to think within a single domain, new roles will likely emerge requiring
personnel to be trained to think in multiple domains all at once.

A fourth barrier is the existence of military subcultures. Integrating AI capabil-

ities across just the air, space, and cyber domains even within just one military
service may be difficult given the differences in subcultures among operators,
the variations in planning timelines, and the dissimilar distributions of authori-

6
 Developing a Concept of Operations for Joint All-Domain Command

ties for achieving different operational effects. Still, the need for all-domain C2
is pressing and increasingly pervasive. For this reason, all these barriers—mili-
tary culture, cyber security concerns, algorithms applied to problems with poor
knowledge quality, data inaccessibility, operations center restructuring and
training, and military subcultures—must be faced and overcome to embed AI
applications in JADC2.

Effectively Moving Forward

The picture may appear grim. Many barriers exist, and a pressing need to move
forward quickly demands change now. Yet progress can be made if steps to-
ward the goal are broken down into tractable problems and if the military keeps
its “eyes wide open” to technological possibilities and limitations alike. The goal
should not be complete automation of C2, but rather effective human-machine
teaming for C2. The steps toward that end should include, first, the continuous
development and prioritization of JADC2 concepts of operation (CONOPs) and,
second, the identification of corresponding needs and opportunities for AI/ML
augmentation in the enabling C2 processes.

Whereas planners and decisionmakers of today are trained to

think within a single domain, new roles will likely emerge requir-
ing personnel to be trained to think in multiple domains all at
once.

At the same time, it will be necessary to set the conditions for a data-driven AI
ecosystem, which means placing weapons systems and related data into multi-
domain data lakes for use by those who ought to have access to the data while
also applying “zero-trust” and other security principles to ensure resilient and se-
cure management of that data. As AI software applications are developed, it will
be necessary to experiment with them in operational testbed environments,
integrate them with C2 systems, and then deploy them to operations centers.
There will likely be iterations of capabilities—first putting limited capabilities
into operations centers, then generating user feedback, and then rapidly updat-

7
 Fall 2021: MDO, AI and IW

ing the software applications. Analysts and technologists will want to explore
CONOPs to facilitate human-machine teaming, build human trust in the AI al-
gorithms, and improve algorithm explainability. Targeted military investments
will likely be needed in areas where commercial demand is lower, such as AI
algorithms for learning where data are scarce or for defending against attacks
against those very algorithms.

Current AI/ML techniques need data from which to learn. Given the (fortunate)
lack of real-world data to inform the refinement of these techniques for war, the
military could leverage modeling, simulation, and exercises to generate train-
ing data for AI/ML algorithms. Such algorithms could then assist in the devel-
opment of, for example, weapon-target pairing. Supervised or reinforcement
learning algorithms could support this C2 function, akin to the learning algo-
rithms recently applied to commercial games. But military algorithms must also
account for uncertainty in real-world situations—a major difficulty for both hu-
mans and algorithms.

As the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff said in August 2020, “Accelerate change or
lose.” Making timely progress toward JADC2 is an imperative for modern warfare
and doing so “within the competitors’ fielding timelines” (Brown, Jr, 2020) is re-
quired. The demand is real but setting realistic expectations for AI/ML is import-
ant. There is room for improvement in existing C2 processes with automation
and, in some cases, AL/ML; in contrast, other C2 processes will remain hard for
both humans and algorithms. As U.S. House Armed Services Committee Chair-
man and Representative Adam Smith, D-Wash., said of JADC2 in September
2021, “The goal is correct, but do not underestimate the difficulty of achieving
it (Harper, 2021).”

8
 Developing a Concept of Operations for Joint All-Domain Command

References:

Lingel, S., Hagen, J., Hastings, E., Lee, M., Sargent, M., Walsh, M., Zhang, L.A. and
Blancett, D. (2020). Joint All-domain Command and Control for Modern War-
fare: An Analytical Framework for Identifying and Developing Artificial Intel-
ligence Applications. Volume I: Artificial Intelligence Applications for Joint
All-Domain Command and Control, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation,
RR-4408/1-AF.

Walsh, M., Menthe, L., Geist, E., Hastings, E., Kerrigan, J., Léveillé, J., Margolis, J.,
Martin, N. and Donnelly, B.P. (2021). Exploring the feasibility and utility of ma-
chine learning-​assisted command and control. Volume 1, Findings and recom-
mendations, RAND Report RR-A263-1.

Brown, C. Q. Jr., Accelerate Change or Lose, [online]. (2020). Available from:

https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/2020SAF/ACOL_booklet_FINAL_13_
Nov_1006_WEB.pdf

Harper, J. (2021). Will the Military Waste Billions on JADC2 Efforts?. National De-
fense [online], September. Available from: https://www.nationaldefensemaga-
zine.org/articles/2021/9/29/will-the-military-waste-billions-on-jadc2-efforts

9
 Fall 2021: MDO, AI and IW

Sherrill Lingel is a Senior Engineer at the RAND Corporation. Most recently,

she conducted research on Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2)
for Agile Combat Employment (ACE) in Europe, preceded by work on ACE in
a contested electromagnetic spectrum environment. She also led a research
team on artificial intelligence applications for JADC2 for the U.S. Air Forces Air
Combat Command (ACC). Her research includes complexity in great power
competition and warfare, multi-domain operations, JADC2, ACE, capabilities for
highly contested environments, and air and missile defense. She earned a B.S. in
Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Virginia, an M.S. in Aeronautics
and Astronautics Engineering from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in
Civil Engineering from the University of Washington.

10