Marine Corps Tests Cloud-Free Networking to Keep AI and Comms Alive When Satellites Get Jammed

The Problem: AI That Dies When the Cloud Does

The Pentagon wants artificial intelligence on the battlefield. There's just one issue: most of that AI runs on cloud infrastructure, and cloud infrastructure is exactly what a capable enemy will try to kill first.

The Marine Corps is now testing a fix. According to Defense One, the Corps' Project Dynamis will evaluate technology from a company called Ditto that turns radios, cell phones, and even drones into a local network capable of sharing data and running AI tools without ever touching a central server.

Eric Hanft, Ditto's senior vice president for public sector and a former Army infantry officer, laid out the core design problem in an interview with Defense One. "If you continue to architect your data flows around that [server-client model], you never remove this fundamental dependency that, if two edge nodes need to communicate and have to go to and from a server, and that server is not available, there's no communication," Hanft said.

This is a core vulnerability. It's the scenario the Pentagon is now planning around, particularly given a fight against a nation-state with real electronic warfare capability.

Two Decades of Fighting Enemies Who Couldn't Touch Our Network

The U.S. military has largely gotten away with treating cloud connectivity as a given. Defense One notes that recent U.S. operations, focused heavily on the Middle East, involved adversaries with no real ability to disrupt American communications infrastructure.

That's not the world the Pentagon is planning for anymore. China is the pacing threat, and Russia has already shown what happens when a modern military runs into an adversary that can actually contest the electromagnetic spectrum.

Ukraine's fight against Russian electronic warfare is the case study here. Cloud-dependent architectures, Defense One reports, are precisely the kind of target a sophisticated adversary goes after first. Jam the link to the server, and every device depending on that server goes dark, AI tools included.

Project Dynamis and the JADC2 Push

Project Dynamis is the Marine Corps' piece of the Pentagon-wide Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort, known as JADC2. The broader goal is to link troops, satellites, drones, and sensors into one data web so commanders can act faster than the enemy.

Marine Corps documents describing these efforts say they're tested in conditions where communication is "degraded or denied," according to Defense One. But specifics on whether cloud access itself gets cut during these tests are hard to come by. That's a real gap in what's been made public, and it matters if the Corps wants to know whether these systems actually hold up or just look good in a controlled exercise.

Marine leadership, meanwhile, has generally emphasized the opposite priority: getting more of the network onto the cloud, not less. Col. Jason Quinter, who led Project Dynamis as commanding officer of Marine Air Control Group 38, said in 2024 that "implementing cloud on our networks is the critical requirement for CJADC2. Without cloud, JADC2 just is not going to come to fruition."

That's a fair position on its own terms. Cloud computing is what makes it possible to fuse data from thousands of sensors and run the heavy AI models that actually produce useful battlefield intelligence. You can't just strip that out and expect the same capability at the edge. The tension the Marine Corps is now trying to work through is real: cloud gives you power, but it also gives an adversary a single point of failure to attack.

What's Actually Being Tested

Ditto's pitch is straightforward: skip the server entirely. Instead of every device checking in with a central hub, devices talk directly to each other, syncing data and AI outputs peer-to-peer. If a jamming attack or a severed satellite link takes out cloud access, the local network keeps functioning because it was never dependent on that link in the first place.

Whether this actually scales to a full Marine Expeditionary Unit running real-time AI targeting or intelligence fusion is an open question. Project Dynamis is described as an evaluation, not a fielded capability. No timeline for a decision on adopting Ditto's technology has been made public.

What's Unresolved

The Marine Corps has not disclosed how its "degraded or denied" test scenarios compare to what Ukrainian forces actually face from Russian jamming, and it has not said whether Project Dynamis testing has included a full cloud outage scenario rather than a partial degradation. Until the Corps publishes results comparing cloud-dependent AI tools against cloud-independent alternatives like Ditto's under realistic jamming conditions, it will be hard to know whether this is a genuine fix to a serious vulnerability or a promising pilot program that never leaves the lab.