Perspectives

Empower the Coalition with Information

Technical enablers for the mission partner environment

“How do you communicate with coalition and mission partners like Ukraine in an efficient manner—and also secure against classified data spillage and compromised intel that can be intercepted by an adversary?” says Heather Fortuna Bush, Booz Allen vice president and Joint Combatant Command (JCC) account leader.

Fulfilling this need is the goal of the Mission Partner Environment (MPE), a program to strengthen collaboration with coalition partners and allies by enabling secure sharing of information. Real-time communications are critical for staying ahead of the adversary: Combatant Commands (CCMDs) urgently require a “left-of-fight” collaboration capability allowing units to work together with foreign forces to share intel, coordinate, and get ready for the conflict.

“Here in the IndoPacific, a secure collaboration environment is extremely important—since our goals range from deterrence to conflict readiness throughout the region, we focus on training with multinational and intranational coalition partners,” says Ed Barnabas, Booz Allen vice president and IndoPacific chief technology officer. “Right now, it takes a long time to set up partner connections, with multiple legacy systems and incompatible networks.”

A task as seemingly simple as setting up a chat to discuss logistics and planning can take days. Allies and partners could be located in regions around the globe, each with their own systems and protocols. And in the future joint warfighting environment, partners would need to be able to add ad hoc groups that might not have a network at all.

To help DOD speed MPE development, we propose a secure, controlled environment that provides rapid and protective access to applications and systems among coalitions. This data-centric collaboration capability allows allies and partners to form flexible groups in minutes or hours—not weeks—and enables commanders to add and revoke access to data in seconds. This communication capability will save time connecting with allies, reduce costs spent on duplicative infrastructure, and increase security through data encryption and zero trust.

Technical Enablers: Looking Under the Hood

In our last MPE-focused article, we discussed zero trust architecture as the foundation and the role of model-based systems engineering in enabling continual changes and updates. Now, we are diving further into how artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning support a successful MPE solution.

“Providing a secure, adaptive, and agile Mission Partner Environment is critical to meet the Combatant Commander’s interoperability requirements across the full range of military and humanitarian operations in this increasingly complex geopolitical climate…In a global dynamic operational environment, MPE is the critical enabler to immediate and decisive information sharing and command and control that strengthens and maintains U.S. alliances.”

- Otto Hoernig III, CEO, Trace Systems

Once coalition partners are communicating in a data-centric environment, AI and analytics play a large role in maintaining system security and organized data. Automation and AI accelerate system performance and ensure flexibility for evolving missions.

Adaptive Data Tagging for Flexibility

“AI-enabled software and algorithms can future-proof data tagging capabilities,” says Eric Syphard, a Booz Allen leader in AI engineering. Take data tagging for an example.

Currently, we rely on manual tagging and cumbersome, slow, and inaccurate cross domain solutions. Adaptive data tagging enables participants to find and share privileged information as easily as they would in an AI chatbot search, with confidence that they will receive a response tailored to their context. For this to happen, data needs to be appropriately tagged according to an ontology, a set of agreed-on standards grouping concepts and categories.

The ideal solution adjusts in real time so that when the ontology must be changed to address a new need or priority, the software can reprocess the data and retag it using machine learning to indicate appropriate classification and releasability level.

Accurate and rapid data tagging is key to MPE success. U.S. security authorities and mission partners need to have confidence that the technology will prevent data spills before it can be implemented.

Smart Scanning for Extra Security

Since security is the highest priority for mission partner collaboration, we must build in multiple safeguards to protect data across varied dimensions. One vulnerability that’s easy to overlook is old data with sensitive information filed as unclassified—for example, a scanned document with a person’s social security number handwritten in the margin.

“Data is incredibly dynamic, and mission context is everything: Coalition partners need the ability to make mission-critical, real-time decisions about any given piece of data at the object level, and easily tie the appropriate levels of classification and access to the data. Supported by AI and ML capabilities, we have an opportunity to vastly improve and streamline collaboration.”

- Will Ackerly, Chief Technology Officer, Virtru

Booz Allen technologists have coded optical character recognition machine learning models that keep classified image types out of transmission and automatically flag data that could lead to a potential breach of the network. The compute is advanced, providing a high confidence level to save operators the headaches of multiple false flags.

Looking Toward the Future: AI for Secure Collaboration

AI performs many other functions in addition to those mentioned above. For example, continuous analytics and AI-enabled solutions can monitor user actions within a mission partner collaboration environment to flag for behaviors indicative of insider threats. This further hardens coalition environments against malicious attack and inadvertent data leaks.

Once the initial instantiations of secure collaborative environments for allies and partners are proven in the field, they can be rapidly modified for AI through modular, open-source technologies and processes like AIOps. Our innovations are designed to scale so DOD can realize the vision of MPE as a data ecosystem allowing coalition partners to share information and insights, take coordinated action—and gain decision advantage.