Joint Fires Network will complete transition from R&D to acquisition program Oct. 1

AFA 2025 — A key part of the Pentagon’s nascent AI-enhanced command system for future wars, the interservice Joint Fires Network, will complete its evolution from an R&D experiment to a formal acquisition program office on Oct. 1, Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey told reporters here at the annual Air Force Association conference.

Cropsey heads the Air Force’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, and Battle Management (PEO-C3BM). In its three short years in existence, PEO-C3BM has already taken over more than 50 disparate programs that the Air and Space Forces want to fuse into a single Department of the Air Force Battle Network. As part of that process, the PEO’s Chief of Architecture and Engineering, Bryan Tipton, is studying how to consolidate disjointed, obsolescent or outright redundant systems into a more manageable number of more modern “end-to-end capabilities,” Cropsey said.

“In three months, I should have a draft of our enterprise-wide strategies about how we’re going to converge those stacks,” he added.

These reforms don’t just affect the Air and Space Forces, however, because many of the systems Cropsey manages also carry vital data for the Army, Navy, and Marines as well. That means his PEO has come to play a central role in connecting all the services into a worldwide meta-network known as CJADC2 — and that role is now expanding even further with the PEO’s takeover of the Joint Fires Network project.

Joint Fires Network began in 2019 as an interservice effort to manage the bewildering variety of potential targets and available weapons in a future US-China war. As one official put it, JFN tries to apply AI to the battle planning problem of “who should shoot who?”

To date, JFN’s been run by US Indo-Pacific Command — with extensive input from other commands, armed services, and agencies — under supervision from the Pentagon’s undersecretary of research and engineering (R&E). But, last year, Cropsey announced JFN would transition to a formal acquisition Program of Record (POR) under his program office, moving from R&E’s supervision to the undersecretary of acquisition and sustainment (A&S).

Specifically, Cropsey is standing up “what we’re calling an integrated program office” to run JFN, he said, combining personnel from the Air Force, Navy, Defense Information Systems Agency, and, to a lesser extent, the Army.

“I put a senior colonel out in San Diego as the senior guy out there representing me [at the JFN office],” Cropsey said. “He showed up this past summer, and we formally take the stick in a week. So 1 October, that program will transition over the Integrated Program Office, and we’ll be off.”

It’s worth noting that the traditional division between R&E and A&S is increasingly blurred, especially when it comes to software-heavy systems like CJADC2. The Pentagon can deploy prototype code (sometimes called a Minimum Viable Capability) during the ostensible “research” phase and seeks to constantly refine and rapidly update already-deployed code during what’s supposedly “sustainment.”

Cropsey emphasized that he’s not cutting anyone out of the interservice collaboration on Joint Fires Network. “We’ve maintained that that joint/OSD-level flavor to how the program is being operated,” he said. “There’s a governance process for JFN that will stay just the way that it is, that ensures that the COCOMs, the related OSD offices, and the related services all have a voice into what that looks like and how we do it. That’s not changing.”

An Air Force staffer explained that the Integrated Program Office will still fall under an interservice Executive Steering Group of generals, admirals and equivalent senior civilians.

Likewise, Cropsey said he’s not kicking out any of the contractors currently working on JFN tech. “The other thing that’s not changing is the current performers,” he said. “They’re going to keep rowing.”

Instead, the goal of the new structure is to reinforce success with more personnel.

“What we’re doing is we’re adding additional capability, people-wise,” Cropsey said, “and we’re going to build out that program office so that we’re addressing integration aspects beyond what they’re currently capable of doing, with the added manpower.”