Why Data and Interoperability Are Critical In Warfighting

In our latest podcast, former Acting US Department of Defense CIO Leslie Beavers explains why digital advantage depends on far more than AI alone.

For defense organizations the ability to connect data, systems, and people in challenging and, sometimes, hostile environments is more relevant than ever to achieving a digital advantage on the battlefield.

Leslie Beavers, President and CEO of LB Insights, LLC, and former Acting Chief Information Officer of the US Department of Defense, describes this digital advantage:

“It’s everything from sensors to information operations centers to the war fighter out [at the] edge,” she says. “Bring all of that information together so you have an accurate picture of what is going on and you can make a decision based on information that is more accurate and more current than your adversary.”

Achieving that vision requires information to move across sensors, operational centers, platforms, locations, and personnel. The challenge is not simply collecting more data, but making it available quickly enough, and securely enough, to improve decisions.

“Data is really the root of success in the digital warfighting advantage campaign.”

AI Can Accelerate Decisions, but Humans Still Matter

AI has an important role to play in helping defense organizations make sense of the large, and growing, volumes of data generated my modern defense platforms.

Beavers points to targeting as an example. AI can help analysts sift through bulk data, identify prospective points of interest, distinguish relevant signals from background noise, and track objects as conditions change. Similar capabilities can also support logistics and assessment activities.

The value principally still lies in augmentation. But AI there are limits to what AI can safely, and ethically, be allowed to do.

“AI cannot be the final decision maker when you’re actually engaging targets. I don’t think we’re ready for that yet,” she states.

She argues that AI outputs still need to be validated, particularly in high-consequence environments. For public sector data and AI leaders, that creates a challenge: organizations want the speed and scale that AI can provide without surrendering the oversight and accountability required for mission-critical decisions.

Interoperability and Security Must Be Designed Together

The difficulty becomes even greater as defense organizations integrate technologies from multiple vendors and operational environments.

Beavers points to lessons from Ukraine, where commercial technologies have been adapted rapidly for military use. The ability to innovate quickly is significant, but connecting large numbers of platforms, manufacturers, control systems, and data sources introduces a different challenge: making everything work together as part of one operational ecosystem.

That makes interoperability an architectural issue rather than a collection of one-off integrations.

It also changes the cybersecurity equation.

Traditional approaches based primarily on isolating systems behind network perimeters become harder to sustain when information must move rapidly across organizational and technology boundaries.

“You have to build security in from the beginning. It cannot be an afterthought that you bolt on.”

Beavers sees zero trust principles as central to balancing these requirements. Identity, credential and access management, attribute-based access controls, and software-defined perimeters can help organizations provide access to authorized users and systems while maintaining visibility over who, or what, is requesting information.

That last distinction is becoming increasingly important. Defense networks must account not only for people, but also for machines and, increasingly, AI agents.

Golden Dome Highlights the Architecture Challenge

For Beavers, Golden Dome brings many of these issues together in a single mission context.

She describes an environment in which information must move across sensors, platforms, cloud environments, vendors, terrestrial infrastructure, space-based capabilities, and communications networks. Systems must be able to detect and track threats, determine what they are, support decisions about how to respond, and continue assessing what happens next.

The broader lesson extends beyond any one initiative.

For missions that depend on information moving across many systems at speed, data architecture, cybersecurity architecture, and operational architecture cannot be designed independently. Interoperability has to be built in, along with the controls that determine how information can be discovered, accessed, and shared.

Agentic AI Raises a New Identity Question

The emergence of AI agents adds another layer of complexity.

Beavers highlights an unresolved question facing organizations adopting agentic AI: when an AI agent performs an action on behalf of a person, should it use its own identity or inherit the identity and authority of the person who initiated it?

The challenge becomes more complicated when one AI agent calls another.

Maintaining a trustworthy zero trust environment therefore requires organizations to understand not only who is acting on the network, but how authority passes between humans, machines, and AI systems.

Beavers says the community is beginning to work through these questions, but they remain an evolving area.

The Hardest Work Is Still Foundational

Despite rapid advances in AI and defense technology, some of the biggest barriers remain decidedly foundational.

Beavers identifies data curation, tagging, and availability as areas where considerable work remains. Many legacy systems were never designed to share information easily, making interoperability difficult even before organizations begin applying AI.

That means the path to more sophisticated capabilities still runs through basic data management.

Organizations need data that can be discovered, understood, accessed appropriately, and used across systems. Without that foundation, investments in AI and automation will struggle to deliver their full operational value.

The encouraging shift, Beavers says, is that these issues are increasingly being recognized as mission priorities rather than back-office technology concerns.

“It is fundamental to war fighting.”

As defense data and technology leaders gather at CDAO Defense in Washington, DC, that distinction will matter. The question is no longer whether data, AI, cybersecurity, and interoperability support the mission from the sidelines. It is how effectively defense organizations can integrate them into the mission itself.

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