The Pentagon wants a secure digital space to easily share classified information with allies and partners. But antiquated policies and fluid dynamics of military diplomacy have made that very challenging.
“Overall, we’ve done a fairly good job of rolling out cloud capabilities to the [Impact Level] 4 or 5 [unclassified] environment and to the IL 6 [classified] environment,” said John Hale, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s head of product management and development Thursday at Defense One’s Cloud Workshop event. “But where we kind of missed the ball…would be in that coalition world—at the IL 6 level. And so, we’re putting a lot of focus right now on how do we solve the cloud capability related specifically to the coalition mission partners at the classified level.”
The Defense Department has been working to simplify the piles of networks military services and combatant commands use to communicate with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region with the cloud-based mission partner environment, or MPE. One of the main hurdles is navigating strategic partnerships in which a nation agrees to work with the U.S., but isn’t necessarily an ally by treaty.
“It’s not just the Five Eyes mission partners that we’ve had traditionally. A lot of those coalition networks are with what we would call non-traditional mission partners,” Hale said. “They’re our ally right now, and we’re working with them on a declassified level. They may not be our ally in six months, but we need to be able to deal with that [data] and manage it appropriately. So we’re spending a lot of time and effort right now to focus on how we specifically solve that.”
MPE’s initial rollout is currently confined to the Indo-Pacific, but there’s opportunity to expand.
“INDOPACOM was the primary use case that started all this. We’re working very closely with the services on this also,” Hale said. “If it does what we all believe it will do…then we’ll roll it out to other theaters.”
But policies and cultural differences also complicate implementing the MPE more broadly.
“We’re continuing to battle policies that were written 20 years ago, when networks and capabilities just weren’t where they are today,” Hale said. “We were joking upstairs that…the only secure computer is one that’s off and unplugged, right? And so we deal in a world where we can’t do that. Therefore, we need to provide as much capability around that data and those systems to secure as possible, but without sacrificing function.”
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