JADC2 Cannot Fuse Data Across Services Due to Incompatible Formats

Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is the Pentagon's vision for connecting every sensor to every shooter across all military branches. The core promise is that an Air Force satellite could detect a target and pass it directly to a Navy destroyer for engagement in seconds. In practice, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines each use different data link standards, message formats, and coordinate systems that do not interoperate without translation layers. The real-world impact is that data fusion — combining sensor feeds from different platforms into a coherent picture — requires manual intervention by human operators who re-key information from one system to another. In a recent JADC2 exercise, it took over 20 minutes to pass a time-sensitive target from detection to engagement across service boundaries. Against a peer adversary, that target has moved, and the engagement window has closed. People die because systems cannot talk to each other. This persists because each military service has spent decades and billions of dollars building its own command-and-control infrastructure — the Army's IBCS, the Air Force's ABMS, the Navy's Project Overmatch — and none of them were designed to interoperate from the ground up. Retrofitting interoperability onto legacy systems is technically difficult and politically explosive, because it requires one service to adopt another's standards or everyone to adopt a new standard, which means admitting your current system is inadequate. The DoD has designated JADC2 as a priority since 2019, but the services continue to fund their own stovepipe programs because their budgets and bureaucratic power depend on owning their own systems.