CDL - Khan BMS Battlefield Management System
What CDL (Common Data Link) actually does on a contested cca protocols link, and why Khan BMS treats it as a formation-level primitive instead of a vendor integration.
For the record: CDL stands for Common Data Link. DoD-standard high-bandwidth point-to-point ISR datalink family. CDL is a family of full-duplex, high-bandwidth datalinks used to move full-motion video, SAR imagery, and bulk ISR products from airborne sensors to ground stations. Variants include TCDL (Tactical), MR-TCDL, and various stealth-compatible derivatives. CDL is mandated for U.S. ISR sensor downlinks and is regularly fielded as the bulk-data complement to a tactical mesh.
Most of what is written about CDL is wrong in the same way: it treats Common Data Link as a protocol to be implemented. It is not. It is an architectural commitment, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up two programs later.
At the Minghan tier — one thousand nodes — CDL stops being a tactical convenience and becomes an operational capability. A Minghan commander issues CDL-shaped intent and lets the ten subordinate Zuuns decompose it; the human never sees a thousand individual streams.
For cca protocols workloads we found the right move was to make CDL a first-class verb in the intent grammar. Operators don't configure CDL; they invoke it, and the runtime decomposes it down the hierarchy.
When the dust settles on the next contingency, the platforms that handled CDL as a design assumption will be the ones still in the fight. That is the bet.