Frustrations are mounting at the Defense Department (DoD) over outdated information-sharing and communications technologies that hinder effective collaboration with allies and partners, according to a recent report from the Defense Innovation Board (DIB).
The board was created in 2016 to provide independent recommendations to the Secretary of Defense and other senior DoD leaders on emerging technologies and innovative approaches that Pentagon should adopt to ensure U.S. technological and military dominance.
During an open meeting of the board on July 17, DIB members offered several recommendations to DoD leaders – including updating info-sharing technologies – based on their recently released study, “Optimizing Innovation Cooperation with Allies and Partners.”
The panel found in its report that lower-level defense personnel are immobilized by fears of non-compliance and security breaches, “revealing a critical lag in modernizing systems essential for national security.”
“Information sharing is of the utmost importance from the earliest stages of research, development, testing and evaluation, to the management of complex military operations,” the report reads. “Despite this, the DoD … has fundamentally failed to develop a system which intelligently manages risk while ensuring allies and partners receive the information they need to properly prepare for and participate in coalition operations.”
To help tackle this problem, the DIB recommends that the DoD develop a cyber and information security assistance program to help allies and partners stand up systems and processes suitable for a modern information sharing environment. According to the DIB, this information sharing environment should include technology acquisition, policy and process implementation, and exercises and training.
“There are allies and partners demonstrating both the will and means to be more effective information sharing partners. It is incumbent upon the DoD to assist allies and partners when these conditions are met,” the report reads.
The DIB also recommends that DoD “consider adopting a category of ‘burner phone’-esque commercial point-to-point technologies to facilitate the transfer of [controlled unclassified information (CUI)] with allies and partners.” In implementing this recommendation, the DIB further recommends that the DoD conduct an initial review of current technologies for communicating CUI with allies and partners and explore their applications in combined multi-domain operations.
DIB members attributed DoD’s information sharing challenges to the department’s persistent overclassification of information.
According to the DIB report, the DoD defaulting to “no foreign dissemination” protocols and failing to develop effective processes for sharing CUI in today’s complex threat environment will continue to lead to a “broken system.”
“Nations deserve their space to make decisions and withhold highly classified information when deemed necessary, but the CUI and Secret ecosystem must be reformed. The system as it currently stands is fundamentally broken. If we are all-in on allies and partners, we must act like it,” the report states.
The board asserts that a robust information-sharing ecosystem will allow the DoD to protect its most sensitive secrets while also empowering the workforce to share critical information with allies and partners as needed.
The DIB recommends that DoD “update its standards for communication and information sharing so that allies and partners can harmonize their technical standards, capabilities, and policies.”
“It is necessary for the DoD to internalize the increasingly essential truth that the real risk in this space is not a technical manual being read by someone that should not have seen it, or a CUI email making it into the public domain. It is that we are insufficiently integrating our allies and partners into key information networks and undertaking preparations for a future informatized conflict,” the report states.
