The increased rate of deployments in recent years of the Department of Defense's (DoD) forces, which often involve rapid, unplanned movements to locations around the world, highlights the need to provide training on demand to individuals and units deployed worldwide. Accordingly, because of more demanding deployment criteria and other time-sensitive constraints, the DoD recognized that yesterday’s framework of "right time, right place" learning, with its use of set times and places, may not meet future requirements. It also recognizes that providing "anytime, anywhere" instruction is essential to maintaining military readiness in the information age, where future forces and their support activities need to be highly adaptive to address threats effectively and rapidly.

In response to the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the DoD developed a department-wide strategy to use learning and information technologies to modernize education and training. The initial effort in that development was ADL. Its intent was to set forth a new framework to provide DoD personnel access to high quality education and training, tailored to individual needs and delivered cost effectively, whenever and wherever required. DoD envisioned using the Internet and other virtual or private wide-area networks, distributed learning experts, learning management and diverse support tools to ensure a "learner-centric" ADL system. DoD sees ADL programs as part of a continuum of learning that encompasses many learning methodologies.

In April 1999, the DoD created a Strategic Plan to guide and expand distributed learning initiatives. Executive Order 13111: Using Technology To Improve Training Opportunities For Federal Government Employees tasked the DoD in providing guidance to Defense agencies and advise civilian agencies in developing and implementing collaborative distance learning standards. DoD's strategic plan defined ADL as a way to leverage the power of computer, information and communication technologies by using common standards in order to provide learning that can be tailored to individual needs and delivered anytime, anywhere. It also includes establishing an interoperable "computer-managed instruction" environment to support the needs of developers, learners, instructors, administrators and managers. An The DoD Advanced Distributed Learning Implementation Plan followed in May 2000 to provide a federal framework. It described the department’s approach to carrying out its strategic plan and provided an update on each of the Services' and the Joint Staff's programs.