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Joint Vision 2020, building on Joint Vision 2010, focuses on interoperability in joint, multinational, and interagency operations, with particular emphasis on alliance/coalition operations. One of the fundamental issues confronting commanders in a multinational operation is the sharing of information among participants. “Need to know” has been operationally overtaken by “need to share.” MITRE has played a significant role in this shift. A number of approaches are identified in this article for addressing this “need to share” issue. 
Two principle aspects to information sharing are what to share and how to share it. How the information is shared is a technical issue and more easily solved. What to share is constrained by the foreign disclosure policies under which the sharing takes place. The first step to sharing is getting the information into a form that enables foreign disclosure. In many ways the first step is the most difficult and time consuming. Currently it is a manual process that is not consistent with the growth of processing of command and control information, especially intelligence. The second step is providing the system capabilities for providing access to the information after it has been cleared for disclosure. Deciding how to share the information can be driven by the information itself, the update rate required, the fidelity required for the mission, and the capabilities of the systems employed by the participating nations. For example, in the case of nine Partnership for Peace (PfP) countries, the objective is to share air situation information between military and civil air traffic control systems and across bordering countries. The PfP nations determined that defining common systems and interfaces that provide the level of interoperability required and acquiring that same system for all participating nations was the best approach. The PfP countries now have a common baseline with common business rules to build upon as the capabilities of their systems grow. The interfaces were defined to facilitate the exchange of track data with the NATO command and control centers as the PfP countries are accepted into NATO. One of the challenges is for the nations to continue to maintain functionally equivalent baselines in the future in order to enhance interoperability. 
From a broader perspective, a number of technical solutions are being employed to share information within the political constraints. One of these is to maintain a set of servers at an alliance or coalition level of security that can be accessed by all participants. An example of this is the U.S. European Command’s Linked Ops/Intel Centers/Europe (LOCE). LOCE consists of a set of servers containing databases and imagery information and a network supporting more than six hundred workstations distributed among U.S. and multinational users. LOCE has been used in support of operations in both Bosnia and Kosovo. LOCE is also an element of the Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation System (BICES). BICES is a network connecting the National Contribution Databases (NCDs) of participating NATO nations. As with LOCE, BICES makes use of a dedicated communications network with bulk encryption devices. LOCE and BICES have been evolving over a number of years and have been making ever-greater use of Internet technology to facilitate the movement of information. The U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) is carrying out Proof of Concept experiments for a Coalition Wide-Area Network employing a capability similar to LOCE. This LOCE-derivative is called the Central Region Information Exchange System (CENTRIXS), with servers to be placed in Tampa and the USCENTCOM area of responsibility (AOR) for use with coalition partners in the Middle East. The U.S. Southern Command and 20 Caribbean nations have adopted a BICES approach as a model for sharing information among themselves and have fielded a capability called the Caribbean Information Sharing Network (CISN). The CISN employs commercial encryption for sharing unclassified but sensitive information and uses the Internet rather than a dedicated communications network as used with BICES. A number of other approaches for information sharing in a multinational environment are being assessed. Two of these are the Multi-Domain Dissemination System (MDDS) at the U.S. Pacific Command and the Content-Based Information System (CBIS) at the U.S. Joint Forces Command. (See the related article on Hexagon.) Briefly, the MDDS effort is investigating ways of providing access from multiple security domains to one source of Web-based information, a common data set of authoritative information. MDDS will acquire information from multiple sources, provide a security review, and place the information in appropriate repositories for access by those who have been cleared for access to the repository. CBIS is taking a different approach. Information is protected based on its content. Two elements of this approach are content labeling and user security attributes. Information is labeled and encrypted electronically to identify classification, dissemination, and release controls. At a user’s workstation, the user is identified by a personal authenticator smart card that includes, among other things, biometric templates, cryptographic keys, and a digital certificate providing authorization to access secure material. 
There have been proposals for the development of a generic U.S. Multinational Information Infrastructure (USMII) that is derived from the LOCE capability and experience. The USMII would be developed to facilitate deployment and employment in a multinational operation as situations demand. It would support both intelligence and operations, connecting the U.S. with coalition partners worldwide for the two-way exchange of information. Also, it would provide U.S.-releasable information such as intelligence products, target folders, missile alerts, and mission plans. It would also be connected through necessary guards with appropriate U.S.-only capabilities. Operational missions could include support to offensive or defensive operations, drug interdiction, humanitarian assistance, and peacekeeping. How can these various initiatives be brought together to capitalize on their strengths and avoid duplication of effort? One approach is to develop a set of coalition servers similar to that used in the USMII that would have as their primary purpose the support of worldwide multinational operations. The servers would be transportable, have a set of software that would be applicable to a range of situations, and make use of Web technology with Web browsers to facilitate employment in multiple theaters. Another approach to consider is coupling servers employing Web technology as the coalition servers. The coalition servers could have interfaces with a Web access secure server as well as local U.S. and allied servers. Similarly, a server using the CBIS technology could be employed as the coalition server, with users from multiple nations having access to the information as a function of the content-based protection mechanism. As the Worldwide Web technology evolves, new opportunities are provided for nations to more easily share information in support of multinational operations. MITRE believes a worldwide information infrastructure, relying upon many different technologies, will evolve to support the multitude of multinational operations across defense commands and civil organizations. For more information, please contact Chuck Sanders using the employee directory. |
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