News Success of JADC2 Depends Upon Relevant and Actionable Data

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Parsons is playing a key role in the U.S. Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which collects and fuses information in new ways that will enable the Army’s JADC2 vision​

A prototype fire control radar used to track threats and pass information to weapons designed to take down the target is being tested during the Advanced Battle Management Systems (ABMS) Onramp 2 exercise at White Sands Missile Range, NM in August 2020.


In June, Parsons won a seat on the $950 million U.S. Air Force IDIQ for the maturation, demonstration, and proliferation of capabilities across platforms and domains, leveraging open systems design, modern software and algorithm development in order to enable Joint All Domain Command and Control. Those capabilities and technologies could help drive the Army’s future approach with all-domain operations.

In this Q&A with Hector Cuevas, retired Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 and general manager and executive vice president for Parsons’ C5ISR and missile defense business, he discusses the importance of data fusion and software development, and how Parsons has been preparing for the JADC2 world for decades.

Breaking Defense: How has Parsons been approaching the future, connected warfighting domain?

Hector Cuevas: For a company with a 75-year history, Parsons really has come of age over the past 20 years during the counter-insurgency fight and is exceptionally well positioned for the future Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) world.

We’ve been the Army’s mission partner for 15 years helping them understand data and analytics, and working with them to develop off-the-shelf software that collects information from various sensor feeds and plugs the data into the appropriate battlefield operating systems on the operational side of the Army. For example, Parsons developed the sensor ingestion software for the Distributed Common Ground System–Army (DCGS-A). Our software standardizes incoming sensor data, such as the Integrated Sensor Architecture (ISA) messages, into formats DCGS-A can more easily process and analyze, which is critical in helping the Army and DoD mine data and track insurgents.

Breaking Defense: Software and data processing has become a critical operational capability over the past decade and will continue being important well into the future. What are you doing to prepare for that shift?

Cuevas: For Parsons it’s really not much of a shift. We have a heavy operational focus on software development and deployment, as well as data fusion using commercial technology. In another example, we are working with the Army on force protection by using software to collect information from multi-modal sensors distributed around Forward Operating Bases. We’re doing real-time detection and fusion into a single track, which gives operators all the real-time information they need to make decisions.

Our expertise in data science is directly tied to our vast experience in supporting counter-terrorism targeting operations. Parsons’ data science approach is focused on operations and operational relevance, versus just conditioning the data—in other words making it compliant only rather than relevant and actionable. We believe that because of our ties into the operational aspect of our customers and our DevSecOps software development skills, we’re able to bring data together in a more coherent way than potentially other vendors that only play one side of that fence.

We make sense of the data through fusion, which tells us if there is a threat that needs to be addressed somewhere in that data.

Breaking Defense: Tell us about your strategy to address JADC2 as the DoD shifts from counter insurgency to the Great Power near-peer conflict against China and Russia.

Cuevas: We’re using our lessons learned from our data-fusion work in counterinsurgency as a springboard for the future threat environment.

We have a consortium mentality ensuring best-of-breed solutions while maintaining interoperability across efforts. And because we touch every aspect of the all-domain space for multiple services, the Army and DoD are getting a best-of-all approach with Parsons. We have multiple examples of this.

We are playing a major role in the innovative and evolving approach to joint warfighting known as the Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS collects and fuses information in new ways by making the information available instantaneously across geographically-separated forces spanning operational to tactical levels of combat and feeding the decision cycle across the spectrum to include strategic, whole-of-government options

In June, the Air Force and Army conducted its second exercise with ABMS and successfully used it to detect and defeat enemy actions against our space asset and also to shoot down a surrogate cruise missile with a hypervelocity weapon. Both military services are partnering on JADC2 and ABMS, and have committed to joint exercises in 2021.

For ABMS, Parsons is the provider of critical capabilities in the national-to-tactical integration of data that ingests, correlates, and fuses it to produce quality target tracks that are directed to multiple tactical-edge weapons for prosecution. This capability provides warfighters with the ability to operate beyond their organic sensor range and influences the battlespace outside of their traditional platform capabilities through augmentation and integration of state-of-the-art sensors.

Our integration experience well positions Parsons to enable a variety of JADC2 capabilities, including: dissemination of strategic guidance with unit-level planning; communication of commander’s intent with the warfighter’s understanding and tactical execution; fusion of national information passed to the tactical edge; successful collaboration across domains leading to actionable intelligence for the warfighter; and providing them with all-domain access to sensors and effects when and where needed with a better understanding of the larger strategic objectives.

Breaking Defense: How is Parsons leveraging cross domain and multi-level security solutions?

Cuevas: We’re operating in an environment where unclassified domain is part and parcel to how we do our business today. So we can’t fight on the secret and top secret domains exclusively anymore. The unclassified domain and how we move data between those domains are critical to that sensor-to-shooter framework that JADC2 wants to get its arms around and implement at each of the service levels.

Our team has leveraged various modern tools to enable flexible and rapid deployment of a secure, distributed ecosystem that provides a platform for agile development of data-intensive applications and advanced analytics. We have reduced the deployment time of this ecosystem from what was typically weeks down to a matter of days.

This foundation supports multi-vendor cloud and on-premise deployment options and can scale to support Internet of Things data volumes, variety, and velocity. Our reference architecture has stored petabytes of data for disparate users across multiple domains and security environments.

This multi-level secure architecture allows for the aggregation of data from and dissemination of data to multiple security domains. This architecture has supported near-real-time streaming of data through to the high-side, and also permits the dissemination of thousands of correlated tracks to the tactical environment with virtually no latency.

Breaking Defense: Any final thoughts?

Cuevas: Parsons touches every part of the battlespace. We’re involved in everything from the sensing grid to data collection and manipulation that becomes actionable intelligence to the operator. For command and control and planning we do it all, including software development and data exploitation from the Internet of Things. We provide solutions across the full spectrum of cyber for the Air Force, U.S. Space Command, and the Army.

We connect the systems and make them work. Parsons has proven and operational capabilities that will ensure all-domain superiority and information dominance in every environment from those that are highly contested to those that are permissive. The company is large enough to execute and small enough to be agile in meeting the military’s most urgent needs.

Parsons builds its systems with industry leading standards and open architecture with an understanding that the military no longer wants to be locked into monolithic structures. Our systems are designed and built from the beginning to integrate and plug into existing architecture, which allows for growth and gives us the ability to develop evolutionary approaches that reach revolutionary capabilities.

Success of JADC2 Depends Upon Relevant and Actionable Data - Breaking Defense

Parsons is playing a key role in the U.S. Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which collects and fuses information in new ways that will enable the Army’s JADC2 vision.

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