Why secure interoperability and trust underpin defence operations

You can no longer judge the strength of a military force simply by the number of people in uniform, the size of the defence budget, or its inventory of tech. These remain essential measures of military capability, but operational advantage increasingly depends on something else.

During my 30 years in the British military, I deployed on numerous joint and multinational operations and training activities. All depended on accurate, timely and secure information flows. Today, that requirement has become even more important as defence becomes increasingly data centric.

Modern Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities need to exchange information across platforms, networks, security domains and national boundaries without compromising classified systems or exposing sensitive information.

Interoperability depends on the resilience and security of the entire digital ecosystem: if commanders cannot trust the information presented to them, effective decision-making is compromised, potentially putting entire military operations at risk.

Why interoperability is key

The ability to share intelligence, targeting information, sensor data and operational information between platforms, formations, headquarters and coalition partners significantly improves situational awareness and accelerates decision-making.

Multi-domain operations require information to flow across land, maritime, air, space and cyberspace, while NATO’s evolving digital backbone and federated digital architecture are intended to enable data and services to be exploited across the Alliance. Interoperability, however, is not simply a matter of connecting more systems.

Data moving between systems can be affected by latency, availability, compatibility, classification, policy and differing levels of trust. At the same time, the growing volume and velocity of operational data expands the potential attack surface and creates more opportunities for malicious content, compromised files and manipulated information to enter military environments.

The objective must therefore be to enable information to move at operational speed while maintaining confidence in what is crossing each digital boundary.

The growing complexity of defence operations

Modern C4ISR environments are extraordinarily complex to build, integrate and secure.

Even within a single service, something apparently straightforward, such as integrating an airborne surveillance sensor with a command-and-control system, may involve numerous networks, applications, data formats, security controls and communications technologies.

Joint operations multiply that challenge. Land, maritime and air forces operate different platforms, communications systems, mission applications and tactical networks. Information has to move across technical and organisational boundaries while remaining available, understandable and protected.

Multi-Domain Operations extend this requirement further into space and cyberspace. I have experienced coalition operations where partner nations arrived with different equipment, different networks and nationally endorsed doctrine and security policies. Establishing interoperability was therefore as much about creating trusted relationships between systems, organisations and people.

Different security classifications and releasability requirements add another dimension. Getting the right information to the right user or system, while ensuring that it is appropriately protected and available at operational speed, is therefore one of the defining digital challenges facing modern defence.

Trust is becoming central to interoperability

Interoperability depends on connections, and those connections are now overwhelmingly digital, placing cyber risk at the heart of military operations.

Traditional security relied on trusted networks and hard perimeters. However, a file arriving from a coalition partner or lower-trust environment shouldn’t automatically become trusted simply because the source itself is authorised. Every exchange needs appropriate controls.

This matters because cyber risk in defence is not confined to an adversary gaining unauthorised access to a network. It also concerns whether the information travelling through that network can be trusted.

Equally importantly, if information has been manipulated or its provenance cannot be established, commanders risk making decisions based upon a false operational picture. For state and state-sponsored adversaries seeking to disrupt military decision-making, compromising trust in data can itself become an operational effect.

Securing interoperability

Modern military forces cannot achieve the required operational tempo by returning to isolated information silos. Instead, security needs to enable information sharing while managing the risk created by it. That requires a layered, risk-based approach based on Zero Trust, secure by design and defence in depth.

Modern cross-domain security is about establishing trust progressively as data moves through a controlled pipeline. Rather than relying upon a single gateway to determine whether information is safe, different security controls can inspect, validate, transform and authorise data according to the risk associated with a particular information flow.

Multiscanning, for example, can inspect files using multiple anti-malware engines, which provides another layer of assurance against known and emerging threats.

Content, Disarm and Reconstruction takes a different approach of assuming content may be untrusted, removes potentially dangerous active elements and reconstructs a clean, usable version of the file.

For higher-risk or unusual content, sandbox technology can analyse behaviour in an isolated environment before that content is permitted to progress further into the operational architecture.

These technologies can be combined with security gateways, protocol breaks and data diodes, providing different security-enforcing functions according to the direction, sensitivity and risk of a particular data flow.

A low-to-high information transfer is primarily about preventing malicious or unsafe content from entering the more sensitive environment, while a high-to-low transfer focuses on ensuring that classified or otherwise sensitive data does not inadvertently leave it.

Trust at operational speed

There is inevitably a tension between assurance and operational tempo. A security architecture that provides exceptional assurance but prevents information reaching a commander when it is needed can itself create operational risk. Automation is therefore becoming increasingly important.

AI and machine learning can help identify anomalies, prioritise suspicious content and automate elements of data inspection.

However, human judgement remains essential where context, intelligence assessment, classification or release authority is required. The opportunity is to automate routine security decisions wherever it is safe and appropriate to do so, allowing people to concentrate on the decisions where judgement matters most.

From network trust to data trust

NATO and its member nations are moving towards more federated, data-centric and interoperable architectures in which information needs to move between services, domains, allies, cloud environments and the tactical edge.

The military advantage will increasingly belong to forces that can connect sensors, decision-makers and effectors across domains and nations, and do so with confidence in the information on which their decisions depend.

People, process and technology remain at the centre of interoperability. However, achieving operational tempo requires a cybersecurity architecture that enables information to move, progressively, establishes trust in that information, and protects it throughout its journey.