Using Distributed Ledgers For Command and Control – Concepts and Challenges

The US military is focused on transitioning its warf-ighting philosophy towards the Multi-Domain Command and Control (MDC2) concept, which integrates lands, sea, air, space, and cyberspace forces into a unified planning and execution structure. This structure depends on reliable exchange of plans and intelligence reports, which is hindered by the development of adversary capabilities in the areas of radio jamming and other communications-denying technologies. The battlefield of the future will consist of dispersed units with intermittent, constrained communications who nevertheless need to maintain a consistent view of shared plans and information. We are developing a proof-of-concept prototype MDC2 system to explore the requirements and limitations of a solution in this space. There are many distributed database solutions that could be used for this prototype; upon investigation, we believe that Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are an ideal fit for the particular constraints of this use case. We have selected Hyperledger Fabric as the particular DLT implementation on which we are building this prototype. As part of this research, we are developing a Hyperledger-based prototype as well as a baseline implementation that reflects how the DoD handles this process today. We will use both of these systems in a series of experiments that evaluate how well they perform in the areas of database consistency, constrained tactical networks, and conditional authorities, and we will measure their performance using a suite of metrics that will allow us to compare the DLT-based prototype with the baseline system. This paper outlines the challenges we will address through this research; the completed research will encompass our solutions to these challenges.