Budgetary and cultural barriers are the biggest impediments to collaboration among the military services said Brig. Gen. Gregory Brundidge, director of command, control, communications and warfighting integration, U.S. European Command.

"We're programmed inside the beltway to think about money and to think about our tribes," said Brundidge Aug. 9, while speaking at an AFCEA NOVA event in Vienna, Va. "'I've got to give up money to some joint thing.' That's uncomfortable for some folks."

However, the threats and capabilities of the cyber domain require the services to look beyond their silos, he said. Right now, joint solutions emerge at the point of need, rather than during design or acquisition.

"It is so much easier, to have the guys that build it--the smart guys that design it--to design it joint from day one," said Brundidge.

"We went COTS and that was our license to buy everything different and now it's time to come back and say, 'yeah, we can do COTS, but we've got standards and certain things that we want to build it to.' And that gets after the business of creating an effective environment for information sharing."

Geographic commands and the Cyber Command are also overlapping and interacting in new ways, but the boundaries are murkier than they are with the branches.

"There's this natural tension between what goes on in a geographical area--and EUCOM or AFRICOM--and how that relates to Cyber Command. The key piece of this thing is what are the controls and what does the [command and control] part of it?" said Brundidge.

Cyber Command will soon have regional units of its own, but how the responsibilities will be divided among CYBERCOM, regional cocoms and services is a "big, big question," he said.

Collaborating in a coalition environment presents a set of challenges, as well. Everyday, units make tough decisions about what to share and not share with allies, said Brundidge. Coalition forces in Afghanistan are working to make that process more straightforward by establishing a framework, common areas of sharing, and interoperable tools and applications.  

NATO's Allied Mission Network, formerly the Afghan Mission Network, is one vehicle for improving information exchange, said Brundidge. AMN is now identifying predetermined mission threads--"things we want to be able to share on day one" that every country needs to put on the network, said Brundidge. "Now, maybe we're beginning to let the information drive what we do, versus the technology," he said.

"I think if we get it right, that becomes the standard for how we build a network and we back off that if we don't need the coalition piece. We've got to start there, because very rarely will we ever fight again alone," said Brundidge.

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