The Pentagon wants to simplify its classified networks—so it’s testing out a secure, cloud-based network on a British aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific, a top defense tech official announced Thursday.
The Defense Department has been working on a new initiative designed to sketch out possible ways to collapse or reduce the number of secure networks the military has to use to communicate with allies and partners, Leslie Beavers, the Pentagon’s principal deputy chief information officer, said during Defense One’s Tech Summit on Thursday. It’s called mission network-as-a-service.
“If we actually get to the point where we tag the people, tag the data and know what’s happening, then having a separate [unclassified network] and [secret classified network] is not the way we would need to secure our network,” Beavers said. “We’ve also been working really hard with our allies and partners to get after that interoperability piece, because at the end of the day….that’s where the biggest challenges [are] within the department. It’s largely based on cooperation, and it’s cooperative engineering that is required between the international partners and us.”
The Defense Department has been working to simplify use of and secure its networks using zero trust principles. But communicating between countries and their militaries often involves a complex set of networks and devices—a problem U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Army have spent recent years working on.
The mission network-as-a-service prototype is designed to be a joint network to include all of the U.S. military services and is currently being tested aboard the HMS Prince of Wales at the secret level, Beavers said. It uses multiple cloud service providers without cross-domain solutions, which are typically used to communicate between networks of different classification levels.
The joint carrier task force is “testing the security controls and kicking the tires on that and making sure that it’s functional for the warfighter—first and foremost—that it’s scalable…that we can repeat, that it is simple enough that we can sustain it, and that our partner nations can sustain it, and that it is also secure,” Beavers said.
If successful, the prototype will be the foundation for a larger architecture on how the U.S. connects with allies and partners with the goal of being fielded broadly in the next two years.
“Then we take it to NATO, and we get the NATO cloud initiative moving in the same direction, because there’s a lot of engineering work that has to be done in the partner nations, as well as in our nation, that has to work together and grow together,” Beavers said. “So, we’ve fielded it, and we’re learning how to make that work. And then that’ll be the foundation as we grow all of these efforts together. That seamless integration that has been…so far away for years, for me personally, is now just right at our doorstep. I see that happening in the next year or two.”
