Lockheed Martin demonstrates CJADC2 “Interoperability” Factory

US defence prime contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a software solution that it says can connect advanced warfighting systems, accelerating the realisation of the US Department of Defense’s vision of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

The company’s self-funded CJADC2 Interoperability Factory is producing an open-architecture, software stack designed to connect the machine languages of existing advanced weapon systems, in a way that is message standard agnostic, says Lockheed Martin. This connection is key to increasing data exchanges, advancing interoperability and greatly improving situational awareness between systems and system operators, it adds.

The CJADC2 Interoperability Factory has already passed company internal demonstrations. Over the next few months, the Lockheed Martin team will be demonstrating the system to customers. The company will be looking to test the system out in the field during future government exercises.

While future weapons systems are being developed with interoperability in mind, products like Lockheed Martin’s CJADC2 Interoperability Factory will connect new systems with existing US DoD and allied systems, the company says. As a modular, open-architecture software stack, Lockheed Martin’s CJADC2 Interoperability Factory is designed to simplify and accelerate platform interoperability across all domains.

“The challenge is to deter aggression, we need to maintain overmatch now and many of our nation’s existing advanced weapon systems were not originally designed to connect and ‘talk’ with each other this way,” said Ron Fehlen, Vice President, Mission Architecture, National Security Space. “Most of our defence systems communicate using about a dozen different software languages. This is where the CJADC2 Interoperability factory comes in.”

The CJADC2 Interoperability Factory leverages a “systems of systems” approach to rapidly share data across weapons systems — like AEGIS, F-35, HIMARS, and SDA Transport Layer satellites — decreasing kill chain timelines to machine speed.

The CJADC2 Interoperability Factory provides an eco-system of approved, verified and validated translators from programs across Lockheed Martin’s product portfolio as well as more mesh-oriented interoperability approaches, such as DARPA STITCHES (SoS Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems). Platforms have easy access to this ecosystem, regardless of their operating environment, allowing for faster progression to deployment.

Lockheed Martin’s investments in AI are being leveraged to increase the speed of integration, reduce the time to develop new apps, and translate complex unstructured data for improved interoperability, the company says.

To ensure operational alignment for the CJADC2 Interoperability Factory, an Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW) mission was used to prioritize the most common translator nodes, as defined by the Joint Industry Standards Working Group (JISWG). Initial demonstrations showed the integration of the Open Mission Systems-Universal Command and Control Interface (OMS-UCI) and the TADIL-J standard, a variant of Link 16.

“Our initial demonstration was very successful,” Fehlen said. “With the successful connection of OMS-UCI and TADIL-J, we’re confident that we’ll be able to build off this success to connect other translators.”

Future translators will support Integrated Broadcast System (IBS) messages and the Multifunction Advanced Datal Link (MADL).