Booz Allen New VP to Focus on Next-Generation MPE

Successful warfighting operations depend on key decision makers having the right information—anytime and anywhere. Cloud networks and digital technology offer great potential for making this happen, but siloed networks, cumbersome data classification standards, and incompatible information-sharing policies among allies and coalition partners create challenges for instantaneous data sharing. 

Mariel Cooley, a newly hired Booz Allen vice president, focuses her work on addressing these challenges, specifically as they pertain to building coalitions with mission partners and allies. 

In her new role, she seeks to create a seamless, data-centric, secure information-sharing ecosystem between the U.S. and its allies and mission partners across warfighting domains for the Department of Defense (DOD): a next-generation Mission Partner Environment (MPE).    

Across a three-decade career in senior positions supporting federal, defense, and intelligence clients, Cooley has enabled joint command, control, computers, communications, and intelligence (C4I) and mission partner integration and expansion, furthered military satellite capabilities, managed the entire lifecycle of an offensive cyber operations program, and more.  

At Booz Allen, Cooley has the opportunity to bring her vision for connecting mission partners and DOD forces to fruition, while supporting Booz Allen’s defense solutions development. 

Below, Cooley shares that vision. 

To understand how important effective mission partner communication, collaboration, and information sharing is, think about disaster response after a hurricane. You need to locate missing people and damaged infrastructure right away. But that’s difficult to do when first responders, geospatial agencies (government and commercial), military teams, local governments, and others have their own systems and no way to easily share the information they have with each other. 

The same scenario exists in the defense space: Data systems are siloed, sharing insights among services is complicated, and sharing and receiving data among coalition partners adds further risk and complexity. Currently, there's a network-centric construct. The U.S. military has, along with mission partners, more than 55+ different IT systems, each with their own separate networks and workflows.  

These stovepipes act as “data jails,” requiring a human in the loop to free information from one place and share it appropriately. This workflow sometimes takes up to 4 hours for a human to share appropriately.  

With this construct, how can they deliver a common operating picture across the entire force—both the U.S. military and its allies and partners—while keeping data secure? The answer lies in an innovative, connected, and secure framework for mission partner collaboration. 

As a leader in the defense industry, I feel we’re in a particularly exciting position to make investments that further the DOD’s initiatives and address these challenges, focusing first on a data-centric approach to alleviate the strain on the human enterprise.  

We’re supporting the implementation of secure, unified data fabrics on cloud-native networks, and, at the same time, developing strategy, technical solutions, and customer engagement for command and control (C2) software and systems.