Connecting Military Nets Through Open Source Collaboration

Open framework permits each piece of the suite to be made available to users as soon as it is ready. "We don't intend to wait for the entire bundle because we'd be wasting warfighters' time. If there's a piece that's ready, we intend to spiral it out -- and the follow-on pieces as they come," Col. McLarney says.

The U.S. military is developing a suite of software applications Get the facts on wireless solutions suited to your industry. that will allow secure communications between different national computer networks. This capability is essential to both coalition operations and disaster relief missions.

The Cross Domain Collaborative Information Environment (CDCIE) is designed to meet combatant commanders' near-term needs to share data with a variety of networks operating at the secret level and below. Created by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's (JFCOM's) Joint Futures Laboratory in Suffolk, Va., the CDCIE uses an open software architecture that allows it to interoperate with other systems, and to be rapidly modified to meet warfighters' needs.

While the CDCIE was developed to overcome difficulties in multinational information sharing between coalition partners, the software also eases data transfer between the various branches of the U.S. Defense Department, U.S. government civilian agencies, state and local emergency responders, and nongovernment organizations.

"We need to share information in the way we're expected to conduct operations with all of those partners," relates Lt. Col. Edward McLarney, technical deputy for capability engineering, Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate, J-9.