In Iraq, coalition countries’ use of different computer systems to store and share information has led to the “sneaker net,” where people must use their feet to share information.
Now, the Defense Department is tackling the problem of multinational information sharing from technical, political and cultural standpoints. Officials say cross-domain solutions are needed.
“As we see in the theater, interagency and coalition partners all have a problem with information sharing,” DOD Chief Information Officer John Grimes said at last week’s Network Centric Warfare conference in Washington, D.C. “Some of that is in cross-domain solutions, which we’re working very hard.”
Information assurance is the main challenge to fielding technical solutions to the cross-domain problem, Grimes said. “The problem is cross-domain solutions keep popping up [in Iraq] and they’ve never been certified from an [information assurance] standpoint, so you don’t know if there are holes in it.”
DOD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently stood up the Cross Domain Solution Management Office to gather and examine industry offerings, he added.
Meanwhile, the sneaker net is not a new concept. “The way it came about it, you’d bring data into some data center on a Sun [Microsystems] box or whatever, and then you’d have to walk it across the floor, thus the sneaker net,” Defense Information Systems Agency CIO John Garing said in an interview. “So it’s now a term that kind of says it’s not really well automated.”
Currently, the Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System (CENTRIXS) is the main coalition information-sharing environment used by U.S. Central Command. It links U.S. military systems with more than 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
CENTRIXS includes leases for commercial satellites, telecommunications hardware and software support, network security, collaboration tools, and commercialization of signal units. In 2004, the Office of the Secretary of Defense issued a policy memorandum that multinational information sharing should be based on CENTRIXS standards.
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