Decision Dominance at Risk

The Cross-Domain Assumption NGC2 Cannot Afford to Get Wrong

By CW4 Joshua Jobe

June 1, 2026 | Warrant Officer Journal, 2026 E-Edition

Read Time: < 11 mins

Decision dominance is the currency of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). That currency flows through the ability to deliver information faster than the adversary can act on theirs. As the Army restructures toward a data-centric force, the ability to rapidly deliver accurate, fused, and actionable information across all warfighting functions (WfF) is a modernization priority (Siegner & Burns, 2025). TRADOC Pamphlet 525-92 (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command [TRADOC], 2024) identifies information advantage as a defining condition of large-scale combat operations (LSCO). Yet architecture designed to protect data is systematically preventing its use. Information security policies and limitations have created a barrier that denies commanders the information they require to make decisions.

Geospatial Engineers have managed a version of this issue for two decades, but the scope of the problem has changed. The data environment envisioned by the Dept. of War’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) construct (AFCEA, 2020), and the Army’s Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2; U.S. Army, 2025a) project — hereafter collectively referred to as Integrated Command and Control Systems or IC2S — will be exponentially more complex. These future systems require continuous, unstructured data to flow across domains, yet our current technology and policies are limited to structured, file-based exchanges. Where the problem was once confined to a single discipline, it now threatens every echelon and every WfF, and current exercises are already proving it. The Army’s modernization strategy assumes cross-domain data flow at the speed of need that current policy and architecture cannot deliver; unless this gap is closed before IC2S reaches full operational capability, decision dominance will fail at first contact in LSCO.

The Problem: A Data Architecture Built for Yesterday’s Battlefield

The Army is moving toward a state where all WfF data is inherently geospatially referenced, establishing geospatial data as the foundational layer for the common operational picture, terrain analytics, and command and control at every echelon (Mission Command Center of Excellence, 2023). While Geospatial Engineering can provide the initial push for large volumes and varieties of this data, covering common features, common terrain, and common analysis, they cannot generate, manage, analyze, and disseminate all data from all WfFs and sources.

Decision dominance, making decisions faster than the enemy, requires fusing streams of data from distributed sensors into actionable information for commanders. IC2S are built around this concept (Pomerleau, 2025a). To do this, however, the data must cross classification enclaves to reach the commanders and coalition partners who need it. The current cross-domain solutions are not designed for the volume, velocity, or variety of data that IC2S will generate (Maruyama, 2025). Cross-domain solution (CDS) systems like ISSE Guard and TACDS (CSIAC 2021, General Dynamics 2026) are solutions for standard message formats, structured data, and file-based packages. In my operational experience managing geospatial data transfers across enclaves, these filtering systems often strip or block much of the metadata and attribution. These IC2S are being built around the low-latency streams of multiple integrated data sources (Pomerleau, 2025b; U.S. Army, 2026).

Making this situation worse is the burden imposed by the National Cross Domain Strategy Management Office (NCDSMO). Any new or modified CDS capability must undergo a Lab-Based Security Assessment through the NCDSMO, a process that can take years for new builds and requires re-testing for any significant modification. This means filter sets and data-type approvals cannot keep pace with the iterative, software-defined delivery model IC2S is built around (Adam & De Silva, 2023; Defense Acquisition University, 2023). This is a systemic institutional issue where the Army is attempting to build a data-centric C2 architecture that is continuously updated, yet still working off a policy designed to change over years, not weeks (Turner, 2026). This is incompatible with the Office of the Army CIO direction to implement rapid testing and iteration from user-informed software and data (2026).

Manual transfer of data from one enclave to another, or swivel chair solutions, rely on human reviewers, burning data to removable media that then must be destroyed, and then re-entering the information on the other side. This is untenable (U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), 2025). Geospatial Engineering has dealt with this for two decades with simple shapefiles, imagery tiles, and geospatial databases, because these are continuous, unstructured, and consistently updated sources of information. The problem is not unique to geospatial data, as object-oriented, referenced, and fused data from all WfF has become the demand of commanders. The “swivel chair” model is outdated, but the transition to integrated data flows cannot happen so long as the systems remain limited to structured data sources and policies like “Raise the Bar” that continue to restrict data types (Adam & De Silva, 2023).

The Army has recognized this gap between doctrinal vision and operational structure, attempting to address it through The Army Data Plan (CIO, 2022) identifying that speed of information is essential for MDO; the Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 (HQDA, 2025; U.S. Army, 2025c) stating that networks exists to serve data and zero trust architecture must enable sharing; and the Unified Data Reference Architecture (UDRA) introducing data mesh principles as the mandatory framework for new programs of record (Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, & Office of the Army Chief Information Officer (OCIO), 2024). As recently as 30 April 2026, the OCIO signed the Army Data Management and Analytics Strategy (ADMAS), which identified five strategic shifts and directed the Army to deliver capabilities at “mission speed.” (OCIO, 2026). These documents outline a vision for a data-centric, cross-domain sharing Army. However, every program written to these standards and compliance requirements assumes a CDS movement that current policy and architecture cannot support at the speed and scale IC2S demands.

The Impact: Every Warfighting Function at Risk

This issue extends beyond any single branch or functional area. The IC2S are organized around all WfFs being integrated into a single data backbone (Pomerleau, 2025b). The inability to swiftly transfer data and stream across enclaves degrades the capabilities of all WfF. This delays decisions from ASCC on down and is no longer a projected risk. Both the Fires and Intelligence WfF have experienced this failure in recent exercises. During IVY STING IV, 25th ID DIVARTY documented the difficulties maintaining live data updates and integration due to manual process dependencies (Kinder, 2026). During III Armored Corps (AC) COMBINED RESOLVE 26-07, they found the same barrier, but from the intelligence perspective (Leidenberg et al., 2026). Both exercises reached the same conclusion: without the ability to share data across enclaves, IC2S becomes theoretical, not operational. The Army is already living the problem.

Compounding this, CJADC2 specifically seeks to extend this concept and requirement to mission partners (CenCore, 2025), thus expanding it to a multinational problem. While achieving minimum viable capability during Valiant Shield in 2024 (CenCore, 2025; GAO, 2025), it was simply to link multinational partners into the Joint Fires Network, identifying proper shooters for targets. The security limitations remain as both a technical and a policy challenge. This challenge is not a data problem, but a data management problem (U.S. Army, 2025b). The Army Data Operations Center (ADOC) was created to address the fragmentation of data across legacy systems and organizational stovepipes and conduct policy review (Lawrence, 2026).

Unfortunately, it cannot solve what policy and architecture will not, and cannot, permit. Cross-domain solution bottlenecks negate the ADOC’s ability to deliver actionable data to commanders. While the infrastructure for data management is being built, the infrastructure to move the data is not keeping pace. This was reported on by the GAO in 2025 and found that the DoW had yet to identify or assign responsibility for resolving the policy and architecture barriers preventing cross-domain sharing under CJADC2 specifically. Who, in turn, said the challenge was beyond their purview (GAO, 2025). This cross-domain urgency is reinforced by the ADMAS (OCIO, 2026), just two weeks before this paper, and yet does not identify responsibility for resolving the cross-domain barrier conditions. This significant capability gap is not something technology alone will be able to solve, but through inventive solutions and deliberate policy actions that no organization has yet been directed to take on.

Conclusions

The Army is investing billions to become a data-centric force — through NGC2, ADOC, the Army Unified Network Plan, and, as of 30 April 2026, the Army Data Management and Analytics Strategy. Each of these assumes that data moves freely across systems, echelons, and classification domains. That assumption is currently wrong, and Geospatial Engineers have the institutional knowledge to prove it.

The cross-domain transfer problem that has frustrated geospatial operations for two decades is no longer a niche inconvenience. It is a forewarning — a preview of the Army-wide data crisis that IC2S will reveal at scale. And the consequence is not abstract. When cross-domain data flow fails, the Fires warfighting function loses the timely, attributed targeting data its shooters depend on. The Intelligence warfighting function fuses a common operating picture with feeds missing from adjacent enclaves. Sustainment cannot move readiness data to the staff that needs it. And every one of those gaps converges on the Commander as a common operating picture that is slower than the fight. Current exercises at the Division and Corps levels are already documenting these failures.

This is no longer an emerging risk; it is a documented vulnerability. The Army cannot afford to discover this failure during large-scale combat operations against a peer adversary. The time to solve this problem is rapidly closing.

Recommendations

Closing this gap is not a single action but a coordinated effort across policy, materiel, and doctrine, and each of those lanes has a logical owner already empowered to lead it.

The first and most urgent task belongs to Army G-6, working with the CIO and ADOC, which must move to eliminate the policy, architectural, and contractual restrictions that are incompatible with rapid, continuous cross-domain data sharing. That work begins with the NCDSMO approval process and the cross-domain solution bottlenecks that have constrained geospatial transfers at the operational and tactical level for two decades. Policy is the critical path: until the approval tempo can match a software-defined delivery model, no technical solution can iterate fast enough to matter.

Materiel development must move in parallel. The Capability Program Executive for Command, Control, and Communications Network (CPE C2IN) should build open cross-domain transfer capability into the IC2S architecture as a foundational requirement, not as a post-fielding integration effort. The current approach — treating cross-domain transfer as something to be solved after a system is fielded — increases cost and fails to meet the NGC2 warfighter requirement. Designing for cross-domain movement from the outset is both cheaper and faster than retrofitting it later.

Finally, the requirements themselves must be defined before the architecture hardens around the wrong assumptions. Transformation and Training Command should identify, document, and publish the minimum data-sharing requirements for every warfighting function, along with the continuous update and transfer demands those data sources will generate. This step is time-sensitive: the data structures and formats are being decided now, and the force cannot build a system to a standard it has not yet articulated. As recently as April 2026, III Armored Corps documented during live sensor integration experiments that policy, not technology, inhibits cross-domain data transfer, and that cross-domain solutions required rapid tuning even when commercial and government off-the-shelf solutions were in place. The requirement is not theoretical; the field is already describing it.

Combatants who make rapid adaptation fundamental to warfighting will be positioned to exploit opportunities and achieve decision dominance in MDO. Current architecture and policy are not built to adapt at the rate the battlefield will demand. The time to solve this problem is rapidly closing.

Notes