Secure comms with allies is hard. The Pentagon wants to change that
The department is working on an effort to streamline a complex set of classified networks they use with allies and partners.
Lauren C. Williams | June 28, 2025
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.
https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2025/06/secure-comms-allies-hard-pentagon-wants-change/406393/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary
