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Distributed Ledger Technology for Command and Control and Decentralized Operations

Authors:
David Last
Michael Atighetchi
Partha Pal
Edward Lu
Ryan Toner

Keywords: Distributed Ledger Technology; blockchain; Command and Control; Multi-Domain Command and Control.

Abstract:
The US military is developing the warfighting philosophy of Multi-Domain Command and Control (MDC2), which integrates land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace into a unified operation environment. MDC2 de-pends on the consistent sharing of operational plans and intelligence reports, which will be contested by adversary advances in communica-tions-denying technology. Thus, the MDC2 system of the future must enable to development and dissemination of plans within the context of intermittent communications. We are developing a proof-of-concept MDC2 prototype to explore the requirements and constraints of this space. This system will be built on top of a distributed database; after evaluating the available options, we believe that Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a strong candidate to meet the particular requirements of the MDC2 use case. Here, we investigate several DLT options and compare their capabili-ties to the MDC2 requirements, analyzing the design tradespace. We also examine several DLT alternatives and identify why they do not meet these requirements. We develop two initial prototype MDC2 systems, a baseline system based on an SQL-type relational database and one based on DLT. We run experiments to compare the performance of the two prototypes, and we discuss how these results relate to their suitability for MDC2. Finally, we outline the future path for this research in order to complete a full-functionality prototype MDC2 system.

Pages: 35 to 41

Copyright: Copyright (c) The Government of USA, 2022. Used by permission to IARIA.

Publication date: April 24, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4413

ISBN: 978-1-61208-940-9

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from April 24, 2022 to April 28, 2022