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What’s Happening

Lockheed Martin has developed a software solution that is ready to start connecting America’s advanced warfighting systems, accelerating the realization of the Department of Defense’s vision of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

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

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.

Why This Matters for Combat Readiness

Interoperability, a long-standing cornerstone of defense strategy, now more than ever enables the DoD and its allies to maintain overmatch and deter peer and near-peer adversary aggression in the 21st century.

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 DoD and allied systems.

“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 defense 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.

How The CJADC2 Interoperability Factory Works

As a modular, open-architecture software stack, Lockheed Martin’s CJADC2 Interoperability Factory is designed to simplify and accelerate platform interoperability across all domains.

Lockheed Martin’s goal has been to leverage its mission knowledge and access to operational systems to introduce cross-domain interoperability for both historical platforms already in operation and newly developed and fielded platforms. This ensures that existing platforms can seamlessly connect and integrate with new technologies, enhancing overall system compatibility and effectiveness.

The CJADC2 Interoperability Factory:

• Provides an eco-system of approved, verified and validated translators – from programs across Lockheed Martin’s broad 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.
• Is designed with industry-standard interfaces, Application Programming Interfaces, and cloud capabilities, allowing other developers to easily integrate their own platforms.
• Can, when deployed to a DevSecOps environment, help weapon systems developers achieve seamless interoperability with a wide array of industry-standard data formats and interfaces.
• Has a modular, open-architecture design that ensures it is highly adaptable to specific platforms and missions.
• Is built on a software stack that is straightforward to adopt, update, and maintain, being similar to other commercial open-source software and mobile Operating System ecosystems.
• Includes Lockheed Martin's Smart translator apps, which incorporate integrated cyber controls and multi-level security from the start.
• Ensures that platforms can effortlessly connect and share data with any other systems, whether developed by Lockheed Martin or other industry providers, thereby fostering a cohesive and integrated defense ecosystem.

“Lockheed Martin is committed to open standards and interoperability drives innovation and operational efficiency, empowering our customers to maintain strategic superiority,” Fehlen said.

Automation and AI-Assisted Development and Operations

Lockheed Martin’s investments in Artificial Intelligence 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 Lockheed Martin AI Center (LAIC) has developed a framework combined with a series of tools that serve as an integration layer for the Interoperability Factory enabling systems-of-systems interoperability and AI-infused services:

• Developer tools and Software Development Kits (SDKs) enable the creation of tailorable decentralized applications, data services, and hardware integrations that can deploy to the tactical edge with industry standard interfaces, and open frameworks and APIs enable interoperability for both new and legacy services.
• Model-based system engineering is used throughout the Interoperability Factory to automate and accelerate software code generation such as generating STITCHES transforms. This significantly reduces the time, labor and risk of this process, compared to current methods.
• The LAIC is incorporating Generative AI throughout the Interoperability Factory tech stack to scale AI-enabled C2 agents that can orchestrate thousands of entities in real time.
• In mission services, powered by Generative AI, can consume textual and unstructured information, assess the information considering relevant mission context, then translate that information into tactical messages, such as Open Mission Systems-Universal Command and Control Interface (OMS/UCI).
• An AI-enabled control plane is being developed to advance beyond static translation software towards a solution that interprets new standards at machine speed.

“AI plays a significant role in operations, but humans are always in the loop,” Fehlen points out. “Humans have the final say in refining, assessing and validating a solution – but they can do it in an extremely rapid timespan.”

Successful Early Internal Demos

In less than five months, a Lockheed Martin team from across the company’s four Business Areas came together and developed a DevSecOps pipeline, unifying diverse software capabilities and integrating multiple 21st Century Security investments like AI/ML, using Model-Based Systems Engineering.

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).

Next Steps: Customer Demos & Exercises

In the months ahead, Lockheed Martin plans to host a series of operational Interoperability Factory prototype experiments leading to Initial Operational Capability later this Spring.

“美诱直播’re done talking about CJADC2 and connectivity. Our next step is to show some key customers what we’ve done to connect these advanced warfighting systems and our path forward to show how this open-architecture design could be used to greatly enhance our warfighters’ capabilities,” Fehlen said.