Defense, intelligence agencies struggle to unify data networks.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

It is an article of faith among military strategists that information wins wars. This dogma, however, often collides with the reality that military information systems resemble the Tower of Babel.

Incompatible data for years has been the bane of war commanders and intelligence analysts. Although the military collectively spends billions of dollars on sophisticated intelligence and information systems, each agency buys independently of each other, which results in a collection of networks whose data cannot be easily shared across the entire defense community.

Fixing this problem is key to future US. military dominance, said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh.

"The future for us is figuring out how to integrate data, how to better integrate information, how to move it quicker, how to connect platforms and sensors together," he said. "That's not as expensive as new weapons systems, and it benefits us in the way we do the job today."

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael G. Vickers decided to tackle the issue soon after taking the job in 2010. The following year he introduced the "defense intelligence information enterprise," or DI2E, which is a concept on how to build the intelligence analyst's Holy Grail: A Google-like search engine that can tap into disparate sources of data and draw from the massive wealth of information resources that exist across the Defense Department and intelligence community.

Vickers' initiative is viewed as a promising first step toward standardized data. But industry experts caution that much more has to be done to reform an entrenched culture that does not reward information sharing.

"DI2E is supposed to unify families of systems," said Vincent R. Snyder, a retired Air Force colonel and vice president of The SI Organization, a Virginia-based company that works with intelligence agencies. The biggest obstacle is the way the military services manage their budgets for information technology, Snyder said. "Today, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps fund their IT programs independently" Snyder said. "They share standards but the requirements and acquisition process are driven by the services." Another impediment is that many defense systems are built with contractors' proprietary software.

The goal of DI2E, he said, is to create incentives for the services and industry to collaborate. But nobody can predict when that will happen. It has been at least 15 years since the Defense Department...