General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) partnered with the United States Indo-Pacific Command and the Army I Corps to further integrate zero trust technology at the tactical edge during the December 2023 Yama Sakura exercises in Japan.
“Yama Sakura was very much a follow on and an iteration on our successes with Talisman Sabre, and it was very much many of the same industry partners as well as the same mission partners,” John Sahlin, vice president of cyber solutions at GDIT’s defense division said. “With Talisman Sabre, we were focused mostly on identity management … and some access control – controlling access based on roles, based on which country you’re from.”
“With Yama Sakura, we added additional capabilities to that mix. We did all of that, plus we added additional capability bricks associated with risk adaptive access control – so now we can put in place monitoring of user behavior and start to make access control decisions based on that. We also added one additional major international mission partner,” Sahlin added, “We met to plan for mission data sharing with the Australian Defence Force and Japanese Ground Defense force.”
As with the exercises at Talisman Sabre, GDIT worked closely with its industry partner Fornetix during Yama Sakura 85 to integrate zero trust technology at the tactical edge.
For example, GDIT was able to integrate common operating picture (COP) data at the edge for the very first time, extending new capabilities to the warfighter in the field and “at the last mile.” This data allows mission partners to overlay strategic data with map data to correlate assets and locations and accelerate decision advantage for the warfighter.
“When we started Talisman Sabre, our focus was mostly on collaboration data – sharing files, controlling access to chat,” Sahlin said. “It was a very straightforward data set that we were working with.”
He explained that GDIT built on its success from the August exercises, and during Yama Sakura was able “to really integrate that COP data into the access control so that the COP views that we were giving were more tailored based on your roles and attributes, like country code.”
GDIT’s partnership with the Army at both these exercises last year is helping to advance the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiative. The CJADC2 strategy is one that looks to link all the United States military domains to allow for seamless data sharing among mission spaces. The initiative also aims to connect the sensors, shooters, and command nodes of each of the six branches of the military in a mesh network.
Expanding zero trust capabilities at the edge is also in line with the Pentagon’s department-wide zero trust strategy, which gives the defense agencies a deadline of fiscal year 2027 to fully implement zero trust.
“I think that the services in general are well on track to execute to the requirements of those mandates,” Sahlin said. “That said, what we’re doing in these exercises is an important demonstration of capability beyond compliance and beyond that enterprise viewpoint. How do we make it real? How do we make zero trust and operational capability that addresses a mission need? And that’s really where this is highlighting that at the tactical edge.”
He added, “Zero trust – just like the CJADC2 construct – is about safely sharing data to execute a mission with our partners, and being able to do it dynamically.”
