Due to the specific design of the network upon the requirements of the demands as well as the situation at which the setting up of a physical network is impossible, a significant role is played by mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) in the applications of military. Various critical tasks like robust & dynamic military workstations, devices as well as smaller sub-networks within the battle field are handled by the presented network type controls the infrastructure less communication. A highly demand of the efficient routing protocol's design is existing which ensures safety as well as reliability to transmit the extremely vulnerable as well as the secret military data within the defense networks. The designing of an energy efficient layer routing protocol within the network on behalf of the military applications is done in this method and the simulation is done with the help of a novel cross layer approach of design for increasing the reliability as well as the lifetime of the network. However, the optimum path selection is not allowed by PDO-AODV technique. Therefore, a novel ACO-DAEE (Ant colony optimization with delay aware energy efficient) to select an optimum path as well as to mitigate the delay time within the network system is proposed. Maintaining the optimum paths within the network while transmitting the data effectively is the major objective. With respect to packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, and throughput, it is indicated by the simulation outputs that the performance of ACO-ADEE is quite good. The efficiency of this technique is verified in the simulation outcomes using NS2 software.