HUDSON INSTITUTE
REGAINING DECISION ADVANTAGE
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POLICY MEMO
Regaining Decision Advantage
Revising JADC2 to Buttress Deterrence in Our Window of Greatest Need
GENERAL HERBERT “HAWK” CARLISLE, USAF (RETIRED); ADMIRAL SCOTT SWIFT, USN
(RETIRED); LIEUTENANT GENERAL ERIC WESLEY, USA (RETIRED)
June 2022
A Need for Urgency
We believe that Joint All-Domain Command and Control
(JADC2) is a critical priority for the Department of Defense
(DoD) as it represents the best path towards deterring
potential People’s Republic of China (PRC) aggression and
addressing the other military challenges of our time. To the
DoD, JADC2 represents the capability to sense and make
sense of information at all levels, in all phases of war, across
all domains, and with all partners, thereby ensuring information
advantage at the speed of relevance.
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JADC2 is therefore the
US military’s essential technical enabler to leverage joint and
coalition capabilities in complex military operations. Practically
speaking, this means choosing important operational
problems and wiring together the right sensors and decision
aids to deliver the right effects to solve them. The result will
create operational dilemmas for our adversaries, and new
options for US commanders.
The PRC has invested time, resources, and focus in
countering the classical American way of warghting focused
on domain dominance.
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Moreover, planned US modernization
and new technological opportunities will not arrive in time
to alter the military calculus of the pre-2030 window of
opportunity for deterring the PRC’s hegemonic ambitions.
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And, even if the US military were able to eld sufciently large
forces, it would struggle to deploy and sustain them at an
appropriate scale and pace.
In the absence of a substantially larger or more capable
US military, effective orchestration and integration of forces
in mission time offers a way to create uncertainty for PRC
planning and a more resilient US posture. The resulting force’s
exibility and operational tempo would be better able to
buttress deterrence and counter aggression should deterrence
fail. JADC2 promises to deliver this more adaptable and agile
US military, but the Pentagon’s current top-down approach
to implementing JADC2 is unlikely to yield results within the
current decade.
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Therefore, we believe that JADC2 requires federated
implementation rather than the current top-down approach.
While certain key elements require leadership directive and
focus—such as resourcing, denition of operational problems,
and support for requisite command structures—operational
