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Petraeus: U.S. must share more info with allies

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A “philosophical change” is needed to help break barriers that keep the United States from sharing information with its coalition partners, the top commander in the Middle East told a lunchtime audience here Wednesday.

“The question should not be ‘need to know,’ it should be ‘need to share,’ ” Army Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, said at a joint war-fighting conference. “If you approach this issue with the imperative of sharing,” rather than restricting information, “you literally change the way you approach the whole process.”

The default setting for working with secure networks, he said, “would be one that would allow sharing rather than NoForn [no non-U.S. personnel] as on a U.S. system.”

Petraeus, speaking via a video hook-up from his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., said he has tried to “operationalize” this approach at his command, where up to 60 representatives of coalition partner countries serve. In addition, officers from the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia act as representatives of CentCom, increasing further the need to share sensitive information.

He acknowledged that there are “obvious” challenges with information-sharing.

“There has to be a degree of confidence that those we share information with will keep it in the right category and not send it where it’s not supposed to go,” he said.

Petraeus also noted some of the technical challenges that make it difficult for coalition partners to communicate with one another.

“We have located 18 separate command-and-control systems in Afghanistan alone,” he said.

A U.S.-led joint task force is reviewing these systems to see how to bring the number down, he said: “That’s a hugely important endeavor, one we’re pushing hard.”

Trust is key

The call to improve the movement and availability of classified and tactical information between allies was also sounded earlier in the day by French Gen. Stéphane Abrial, NATO’s supreme allied commander for transformation and the former head of the French Air Force.

Abrial noted a new Afghan mission network is being implemented that, when it reaches operational capability in July, should, for the first time, link the coalition commander with all his units.

But trust, he said, is key to the ability to share information.

“Trust is a two-way street,” Abrial said, “and if an allied partner can’t trust a headquarters, that ally cannot be kept from intelligence by anomalies such as NOFORN that create confusion.”

NATO members, he said, have “a natural framework through which rules can be developed and eventually spread to other nations.” But cultural changes are still needed.

“Interoperability must be hardwired into programs’ initial DNA,” Abrial said.

He cited a coalition commander in Afghanistan who needed four different kinds of radios to communicate with his forces.

“That is inefficient and costly,” Abrial said. “I would like to say things are improving, and they are. But as operations demonstrated, we are not moving forward quickly and effectively enough” to offset the still-increasing technological gap between the United States and its closest allies.

The issue of information-sharing is even more important when deciding how to handle ballistic missile defense, Abrial said.

“For BMD, this will be probably more difficult than in other domains,” he noted. “This notion is still contentious — some nations are very willing, others are not.”

And if NATO takes over the mission, “it will be necessary to solve this critical issue of information-sharing,” which won’t be easy, he said.

“It is extremely closed and sensitive and related to the sovereignty of nations,” Abrial said. “It could not be NATO alone.”