Acting Department of Defense Deputy Chief Information Officer for Information Enterprise Danielle Metz discusses “Delivering Better Software Faster to the Warfighter,” the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Jan. 27, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
TECHNET CYBER 2022: The Defense Department in the next few months anticipates reaching initial operating capability for a new software tool viewed as a key enabler for collaboration between combatant commanders and mission partners, according to a top DoD IT official.
The Secret and Below Releasable Environment, or SABRE, will “blend the intel aspects as well as the [command and control aspects] together in a cloud-based approach,” Danielle Metz, chief IT strategist for the office of the secretary of defense, said Wednesday at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber 2022 conference.
“I think that we have struggled for a very long time on the mission partner environment,” Metz said. “The combatant commanders have been screaming for the need to be able to seamlessly… collaborate not only internally with themselves, but across the mission partners. And a mission partner can mean anything to anybody depending on where you are located and depending on what that actual mission is.”
According to a Nov. 29, 2021 DoD news release, SABRE will allow sharing anything from a document to combined fires to any type of mission application. Previously, the US and its mission partners — including other parts of the US government or law enforcement — brought their own networks that couldn’t be connected due to both incompatibility and security issues, according to the release.
Famously, DoD struggles with having a joint digital operating environment for the services, and getting foreign partners on board adds an extra layer of confusion. Given how often Pentagon officials talk about foreign partners and allies as the key differentiator between the US and its peer competitors, the utility of being able to share information easily across one network is obvious.
The DoD release describes the potential as such: “For some operators, conducting operations in such an environment might have meant fielding a call for an airstrike using one computer attached to one nation’s network, then manually typing information about that airstrike request into another nation’s computer on a different network.”
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Metz said SABRE will be delivered “this spring or summer” first to US Indo-Pacific Command, which will then start its implementation plans to migrate its mission applications onto the new environment. She added the DoD CIO’s office needs to ensure that it’s working with mission partners to decide how they’re going to move mission applications onto SABRE.
“It’s not enough just to have the technology, we need to make sure that we have the mission applications in there and that the users know how to use it and that it is all working together,” Metz said.
“So it is a journey and I think that we’ve moved along from having a perfect solution, or what we thought would be a perfect solution, and then delivering it to being able to set minimal viable products that we can easily build upon and get that user feedback so that we can improve when and where it’s needed instead of waiting until after delivery, which often means that the technology and the actions are going to be obsolete.”
