Joint All-Domain Command and Control for Modern Warfare

AIRPOWER STUDIES
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Airpower Studies
SHERRILL LINGEL, JEFF HAGEN, ERIC HASTINGS, MARY LEE, MATTHEW SARGENT, MATTHEW WALSH, LI ANG ZHANG, DAVID BLANCETT Joint All-Domain Command and Control for Modern Warfare
An Analytic Framework for Identifying and Developing Artifcial Intelligence Applications
1. Challenges of Implementing Joint All-Domain Command and Control Within the U.S. Air Force’s Current Operational Level Construct
Multidomain operations (MDO) arguably represent a means of waging warfare increasingly employed by the United States and others for decades. Land, sea, and air forces are brought to bear against adversary air, land, and sea forces that often rely on capabilities from space-based systems and digital information from computer networks. Given these additional domains, what is driving today’s modern warfare vision for MDO? In modern warfare, space is no longer a sanctuary in which offensive and defensive actions are rare, and cyberattacks on adversary networks and network self-defense are expected and planned for likely before kinetic hostilities even begin. In fact, actions in these newer warfighting domains are happening in the current gray zone, further emphasizing the urgency for close synchronization of efforts among all domains available in competitions and conflicts. The Air Operations Center (AOC) is the primary operational-level central command and control (C2) node for the U.S. Air Forces. These physical centers with large staffs are where planning, execution, and assessment of air operations occur. There are currently several region AOCs and six functional AOCs (Table 1.1) around the world. Functional operations centers (OCs) support functional combatant commanders (COCOMs) in the areas of global strike, space, mobility, special operations, cyber, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Regional AOCs support geographic COCOMs and are used for planning and executing theater operations in support of a joint force commander (JFC).
Current Operational-Level Command and Control Challenges The technological architecture underlying the baseline AOC system is made up of a patchwork of C2 systems that enable all phases of the air-tasking cycle (ATC). The AOC is normally employed by the joint force air component commander (JFACC) to exercise control of air forces in support of combined and joint force objectives. The effectiveness of the AOC construct, along with the associated doctrinal concepts of a functional air component commander and a centralized air planning process with decentralized execution, was demonstrated to great effect in Operation Desert Storm, galvanizing the role of the AOC in operational-level C2. The AOC has been tested in numerous conflicts since Desert Storm and, although methods for employing it have evolved, the AOC has remained the accepted paradigm for C2 of air forces. Nevertheless, the AOC construct has recently been challenged for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the increasing attention on MDO: The growing emphasis on improved cyber and space integration has plac...