This briefing reviews current U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) policy for ensuring interoperability and information assurance of command, control, communication, intelligence, and weapon systems. DoD interoperability, information assurance, acquisition, and joint requirement policy are reviewed. This review identifies ambiguities, conflicts, overlaps, and shortfalls in DoD policy and recommends solutions for clarifying policy and remedying other shortcomings. The authors found that interoperability-related policy issuance has sharply increased in recent years and includes conflicts and redundancies. They also found that global information grid (GIG) technical guidance is still evolving because of continuing advances and change in networking and software technologies. The authors recommend reducing the number of policies and increasing their actionability and traceability. They also recommend that technology risk levels be developed for GIG functional areas, that these be used to track GIG programs during development, and that net-centric implementation documents more carefully define the capabilities for core GIG enterprise services and specify the technical standards with which GIG programs will have to comply for interoperability.
