Air Force to Finally Take Lead on Network for Joint Fires as It Consolidates C2

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—After more than a year of preparation, a once-obscure Air Force program office will on Oct. 1 assume management of a key effort to network forces from every military service in near real time, culminating an expansion that has placed it at the center of the joint force’s vision for a digital future.

The program executive office for command, control, communications, and battle management, will stand up its integrated program office for the Joint Fires Network, or JFN, next week, PEO C3BM Commander Maj. Gen. Luke C.G. Cropsey told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 23.

The Joint Fires Network began life as an ambitious, under-funded experiment by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command—an attempt to build out the long-standing Pentagon vision of a totally networked force, where sensors like radar, surveillance drones, and even satellites could be connected in real time with shooters like Navy cruisers, Army artillery, or Air Force fighters and bombers—and where allies could contribute to and make use of a common operational picture.. 

Combined Joint All-Domain Command & Control, or CJADC2, as the vision was dubbed, would allow commanders to call in strikes from land, sea, or air with the swipe of a finger—as easily as summoning an Uber.

But the vision ran up against the reality of stovepiped command and control and legacy IT, leaving regional commanders with little choice but to try to jerry-rig their own solutions. “Because we have not delivered [an] enterprise solution, each theater is implementing its own flavor of CJADC2,” Miyi Chung, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s technical director for the Pacific, said at an industry event earlier this year.

Indeed, Cropsey has already worked on a different common operating picture program called Cloud-Based Command and Control, which deployed to NORAD for air defense over North America back in 2023. CBC2 has since expanded and could play a role in Cropsey’s work on the Joint Fires Network.

Last year, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced the Pentagon, in an effort to centralize management of these proliferating solutions, had made the Department of the Air Force the executive agent for JFN. Subsequently, a memo signed by the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante named PEO C3BM as the Air Force organization responsible.

But the transition process has taken months and only reached its peak this summer, when Cropsey “put a senior colonel out in San Diego representing me,” he said. The integrated program office would be “a combined Air Force, Navy, [Defense Information Systems Agency] and to some extent, Army, program office.”

The C3BM office was formed in 2022 to give clearer direction and stronger oversight to roughly 50 programs comprising a future “DAF Battle Network.”. It has expanded rapidly since its launch, from around 200 staff and an annual budget of about $250 million to thousands of employees and a multi-billion-dollar budget. 

Cropsey said the IPO stand-up would top a list of programs that the his office had absorbed over the past year:

C2ISR, that provides connectivity for the Air Force’s intelligence products
The iconic Kessel Run team, building a new operating system for Air Operation Centers
The airspace mission planning team that manages the actual execution of air tasking orders, ensuring that the pilot, the airplane, the munitions, the correct fuel load, all know where they’re going and where they need to be.
The aerial networks division that manages tactical data links and provides the “last mile” connectivity to the cockpit. 

“We have, at this point, inside of at least the Air Force, …all the [command and control procurement] in one place,” Cropsey said.