Arlington, VA | August 29, 2025 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies is pleased to announce a new entry...
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Not sure if it's been posted here but I saw this paper being floated around elsewhere on this site and others too so I went and read it. The paper itself is highly questionable and assumes the intended audience has spent a whole 5 minutes reading about how the DoD intends on operating in the future. The paper is critical of JADC2 and the whole joint warfighter concept and instead places great emphasis on disaggregated ops with 5th and 6th gen fighters as nodes of processing and control.
However, I think it brings up a good opportunity to discuss what other operational concepts can be utilized in the inevitable event of network degradation.
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The entire argument hinges on essentially the two following assumptions
"The JWC appears to rest on an unproven assumption that larger U.S. force packages can and will be integrated, coordinated, and synchronized, and have shared situational awareness and interconnected decision-making processes that enable them to deliver effects across all domains seamlessly."
and
"Unproven concepts like pulsed airpower and expanded maneuver to facilitate long-range kill chains appear to presume a level of communications, networking, and connectivity that China’s counter-information strategy (informationized warfare) will not allow."
They then float the proposition of pushing out the command and organization to edge units centered around 5th and 6th gen fighters. Instead of serving out persistent target updates and what not, joint controllers broadcast out desired effects to be achieved and high priority targets and leave the tactical ISR, organization and decision making to the unit themselves. All of this hinges on 5th and 6th gen fighters acting as ISR, computing and communication nodes. They also propose that in this operational concept, a central controller dispatches combines ISR and broadcasts to edge units. All of this is referred to as the Disaggregated Collaborative Air Operations concept (DCAO)
I'm not sure if all these think tank papers are like this, but sometimes I wonder what the author was thinking because:
- The two fundamental assumptions made about JADC2 and JWC appear flawed to me. No military in the world creates an operational concept that accounts for zero contingincies. The paper fundamentally missed the other part of the whole operating concept, which is the variants of adpative combat employment (ACE) across different branches, which, for all intents and purposes fits both into JADC2 and JWC. While highly connected and networked and focused on pulsed operations, it also created self sustained units capable of operating on their own if disconnected from the grid, with 5th and 6th gen fighters ability to operate as AEW, ISR and communication nodes being touted basically since 5th gen fighters became a thing. ACE has already seen originaly disparate units like refueling, logistics and tac air being trained up and deployed as a single unit, operating out of remote bases and what not.
- Whether it's the US or the Chinese, no one assumes there networked comms aren't going to get degraded. Both sides are focusing on deploying large, redudant and self healing communication networks that aren't easily destroyed. What they do to use will also be done back to them and that "attritional warfare" this paper sought to avoid will inevitably happen. That's essentially what envisioning warfare between system of systems devolves to - the friction and resulting damage two systems inflict upon the other. China might well be targeting communication nodes with various kinetic and non-kinetic abilities, but the end goal is to do the same back to them. All these assumptions about how the Chinese warfighting concept is a hard counter to what the US has fielded feels like strawmanning.
- It points to 5th and 6th gen fighters as the central controlling node, with a specific emphasis placed on one way inter unit, intra unit and command - unit comms as two way comms will be easy to triangulate and destroy quickly. It's as if the guy writing this just looked at the military's press release and started foaming at the mouth - the whole idea of limiting transmissions and passive targeting was already being practiced when the F-22 was designed in the 90's. Every impression I've had about air combat seems to be that transmissions in a peer fight are already highly managed, with two way data links mainly used for guiding missiles. ISR can also just be 1 way uplinks.
The real value of this paper seems to be that we need to buy more 5th and 6th gen fighters and that's pretty much it... everything else in this paper is either covered, or was never a "blind spot" at all.
futurism.com
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
www.defensenews.com
www.airandspaceforces.com
www.defensenews.com
www.defenseone.com
