Rick Kozak / Staff Col. Richard A. Davis is chief of U.S. Central Command’s Strategic C4 Architecture, Programs and Policy division.

The fight to defeat the terrorist cells that haunt the world will only be successful if information can be shared among agencies and coalition partners, a senior official at U.S. Central Command said.

And doing that means operators must resist the urge to put the highest classification on intelligence and other documents – classifications that make it that much harder to share, said Col. Richard A. Davis, chief of U.S. Central Command’s Strategic C4 Architecture, Programs and Policy division. That requires technological solutions – but it also means overcoming cultural obstacles.

When individuals produce information “products,” they often automatically assign it the highest classification possible, Davis said, sometimes out of good sense but sometimes simply out of habit. That makes it harder to share among friends.

“One of the biggest cultural issues we have to address is, number one, from the U.S. side, the first and biggest thing to do is go ahead and produce products for release,” said Davis, speaking at the 6th Annual C4ISR Journal Integration Conference, titled “New Tools for War in Real Time,” in Arlington, Va. “Assume releasability for coalition staff and make sure that as you generate those you consider that up front.”

Hundreds of terrorist cell networks exist across the Middle East and U.S. Central Command is responsible for many of them. But it can be difficult to share that information even within agencies. The design of the networks that store the information means sharing it can be clunky – and time consuming.

Sometimes, information sharing and connectivity between systems can be as simple as the number of phones on a desk. Davis related the anecdote of standing inside the office of Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, when the general expressed frustration with the fact that he has four different phones on his desk and three computer monitors – symbolic of too many networks that don’t talk to one another.

Centcom is addressing the problems with a variety of initiatives, he said.

“We’re working hard to come up with a new approach for information sharing,” Davis said. “We’ve come to the conclusion that we need to find ways to merge networks and data stores. We have to take that step so that I as an individual can access data based on the privilege I have and my identity within that network.”

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