The Navy has been running a large-scale digital intelligence project called “Overmatch” for six years, designed to bring together key information from multiple Navy assets at sea, in the air and even on land, to form a holistic picture of the battlefield. The project began in 2020 and was kept secret for nearly two years before becoming public, according to Defense News.
The project is part of a Department of Defense project called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, which encompasses all branches of the U.S. military. It is designed to paint a holistic picture of joint operations, while also providing a mechanism for regular system upgrades, meaning the Navy is moving toward a future where software on its ships and submarines can be updated, just as Tesla sends software updates to its cars remotely. The project also aims to gather detailed intelligence on its enemies, using sensors from ships, submarines, aircraft or satellites to create a detailed overview of the adversary’s movements in order to exploit their weaknesses.
Project Overmatch will unify intelligence from four other key allies – namely Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – into the Five Eyes global intelligence community. To expand the footprint and detail of information collected by the Navy and other branches of the Department of Defense (War), the project aims to integrate with the military assets and data sources of these allies. Together, they can provide more effective situational awareness and strike capabilities during multinational operations. The recent RIMPAC 2026 military exercise tested these integrations on a large scale and was a crucial step towards implementing the technology in a real-world scenario. Although the project is already six years in development, it is far from being successfully deployed, with spending allocated until the 2029 financial year.
How the Navy Shares Data Securely
One of the most important aspects of Project Overmatch is creating the infrastructure required to integrate supporting intelligence at this scale. Information obtained from a 2025 NDIA Overmatch Brief details elements of the data structures and intelligence collection mechanisms. The Naval Operational Architecture (NOA) will form the foundation of these systems by facilitating networks, data architecture, tools and analytics. As work progresses on the NOA, data must come from somewhere, and the mechanisms for generating and sharing it vary depending on location.
Modern Navy ships and aircraft use radar and advanced still or video imagery to detect enemy targets. Radar information can provide the range and speed of a target, and imaging technology can assist in the identification of a target and its origin. All of these detection methods will be shared in a central cloud-based data warehouse to be used to form a holistic view of a combat environment. The key to properly using this data is to ensure it is standardized to align with newly designed data models.
A variety of hardware and software tools are deployed on ships to facilitate the standardization required by Project Overmatch. Images obtained from sensors on board ships or aircraft must be transformed into specific formats, files must be labeled in certain ways, and data must be sent in specific structures and formats to be accepted by the data model. AI models have even been deployed as part of edge computing, where data is processed where it comes from to facilitate this standardization and add a first layer of intelligence before being shared.
This is how wars will be fought thanks to AI
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The cornerstone of Project Overmatch and the JADC2 effort is to enable decision-making through artificial intelligence (AI), marking the start of a new era in digital warfare. By aggregating data collected from all of its ships and aircraft, the Navy and its allies will provide real-time status of enemy positions and activities that can be used by AI-based learning models to analyze enemy assets and behaviors on a global scale. These systems can then quickly identify weaknesses that could be exposed to inflict maximum damage on enemy forces during any military operation.
Not only can AI be leveraged to surface this information in near real time, but it can also identify the ship or aircraft best positioned to carry out a strike on a target. The United States and its allies must stay at the forefront of this technology in order to maintain a strategic advantage over their adversaries. China is already working on similar technology. According to China’s 2022 Annual Military Power Report, China has developed its own version of multi-domain precision warfare.
This will create an interesting new layer of counterintelligence strategies between East and West. In a world where AI is used to expose critical vulnerabilities and provide optimized fire solutions, nations will need to develop ways to conduct counter-AI operations to ensure success in future conflicts.
