Due to the specified designed network on behalf of the on-demand necessities in addition to the various circumstances in which establishing the physical network is impossible, a significant role is played by the mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) in the military applications. The severe issues like extremely strong as well as dynamic military workstations, devices in addition to insignificant sub-networks within the battlefield are handled by the various kinds of the network that is controlled within the infrastructure less communication. In order to transmit the extremely sensible as well as secured military data within the defense networks, a higher demand of efficient routing protocol design that ensures the safety as well as reliability. The designing and the simulation of the power efficient network layer routing protocol within the network on behalf of the military applications is done by this aim in addition to a novel cross layer method for widely increasing the accuracy as well as lifetime of the network. The selection of the optimal path is not supported by the PDO-AODV approach. Therefore, a novel ACO-DAEE (Ant colony optimization with delay aware energy efficient) is proposed in order to select the optimal path and to mitigate the network system’s delay time. Maintaining the optimal path within the network in the duration of transmitting the data effectively is the objective of this method. With respect to packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, and throughput, the performance of the ACO-ADEE is effective as shown in the simulation outcomes. The efficiency of this approach is verified by using NS2 through the simulation outcomes.