A UK defence customer came to D3IP with a deceptively simple question: can you ensure command and control (C2) capabilities when the environment is actively working against you? Modern operations increasingly face sophisticated electronic warfare, cyber-attack, and anti-access/area-denial tactics — all designed to disrupt or sever the communication pathways that everything else depends on. We opened the challenge to the D3IP Community to utilise the industry and academic expertise and through a tight six-week discovery phase, this is what we learned.
Command and control (C2) is the exercise of authority and direction over resources, systems, and forces to accomplish a mission. A denied or degraded environment is one where the usual ways of staying connected can't be relied on. That can happen through:
- Jamming and electronic warfare that drown out radio signals
- Cyber-attacks that target the network itself
- Area-denial tactics that cut off satellite or infrastructure links
- Simple environmental disruption — weather, sea state, distance, etc.
Communications You Can't Take for Granted
Traditional naval communications lean heavily on paths that a capable adversary can predict, jam, or intercept. As platforms become more distributed and increasingly uncrewed, the stakes rise: losing the link can mean losing control. The challenge wasn't to find a single decisive fix, it was to understand how established and emerging technologies could be combined into something genuinely resilient.
Three questions framed the work:
How can networks dynamically adapt to degraded communications while preserving mission intent and coordination?
What level of performance and assurance is achievable under different threat conditions, and how do you measure it?
What role can emerging technologies (AI, quantum, low-Earth-orbit constellations, edge computing) play in strengthening resilience?
Three Findings That Shaped Everything
No single solution exists. Survivable C2 in contested conditions comes from layering multiple approaches that work in concert — established technologies alongside emerging ones, managed by intelligent orchestration that adapts to conditions in real time.
Open, modular integration is essential. Solutions that are bearer-agnostic and standards-based integrate far more quickly with legacy platforms and coalition partners. Middleware and translation layers reduce bespoke engineering while keeping operators firmly in control.
Assurance is continuous, not static. Trustworthy systems log their decisions, expose their health and routing choices, and recover fast after compromise. Assurance is an ongoing process, not a one-time certification.
Seven Pillars, One Resilient Fabric
The assessment settled on seven complementary technology pillars. Each contributes something the others can't, and the real value comes from weaving them together so that traffic can move seamlessly between them as conditions change.
| Technology pillar | What it brings | Maturity |
|---|---|---|
| Line-of-sight alternatives | High-bandwidth, secure & hard-to-detect links (optical and highly directional) where conditions allow | Mixed |
| Resilient RF techniques | The dependable backbone, with improved resistance to jamming and interference | Ready now |
| Autonomous networking | Self-healing mesh networks that reroute around failure with minimal operator burden | Maturing |
| Multiple bearers | Diversity across satellite, radio & high-altitude paths that removes single points of failure | Ready now |
| Cyber resilience | Trust built in at the protocol level, with rapid recovery after attack | Maturing |
| Low-probability intercept / detection | Stealth that reduces an adversary's ability to detect and target high-value platforms | Mixed |
| Novel concepts | Next-generation ideas — quantum-resilient data, decentralised trust, cognitive networks | Emerging |
Four Levers A Commander Can Actually Pull
The strength of a portfolio approach is that it gives decision-makers levers to adjust according to the mission in front of them, rather than a fixed configuration to live with.
Capacity
Push high-bandwidth traffic when conditions are favourable, and scale back gracefully when they're not.
Covertness
Route critical traffic stealthily to reduce the chance of detection and targeting.
Recoverability
Rebuild trust and connectivity quickly after compromise, rather than depending on links never being lost.
Credibility
Provide real-time evidence of assurance, so operators can trust — and audit — what the network is doing.
From Denied To Assured — A Phased Path
None of this happens overnight. The Discovery activity identified a phased, 10-year direction of travel: prove the mature technologies first, then broaden trials and coalition interoperability, and finally field the transformational capabilities on the back of hard evidence.
Early Engagement, At Pace
This is what D3IP is built to do: take a real challenge from a challenge owner and put it in front of a diverse community of innovators — early, and without the prohibitive cost and time pressures of traditional procurement. In six weeks, a single question became an evidence-led roadmap.
Help shape the next challenge
D3IP connects innovators with real defence challenges — before the tender, before the cost, at the point where your expertise can actually shape what's needed. Join the D3IP Community and be in the room next time.
Made possible by the D3IP Community
Discover more from D3IP…
FCCM Initiative: Can AI Take the Burden Out of Army Capability Planning?
What if AI could handle some of the most resource-intensive work in defence capability planning? That was the challenge the British Army sought to solve using D3IP’s Innovation as a Service model and collaboration network.
The Defence Investment Plan is Here: What it Means for SMEs
The long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was published last week, setting out how the Ministry of Defence will allocate £298 billion of investment over the next four years, including £15 billion of additional spending on top of last year’s Spending Review.
Register Your Interest in the D3IP Community
© 2025 D3IP | D3IP is a brand of DII Ltd.
Resources
© 2025 D3IP | D3IP is a brand of DII Ltd.
Proudly Supporting
