DIA about to get authority to operate MARS capability on classified network

The Defense Intelligence Agency is close to getting the green light to operate an artificial intelligence-enabled tool on the U.S. military’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, according to a senior official.

The spy organization is rolling out the Machine-assisted Analytic Rapid-repository System, or MARS, to replace the decades-old Military Intelligence Integrated Database with a cloud-based capability that can use AI to help analysts sift through and make sense of big data.

“When we look at it on the analytics side, certainly MARS is one of the flagship programs that we have in the agency that’s looking at how do we automate and visualize the historical nature of foundational military and infrastructure targets? That is certainly one, and part of that is creating an object management system so we have authoritative objects and authoritative attributes to those objects that we can share across the [Defense Department and intelligence] community,” DIA Chief Information Officer Doug Cossa said Tuesday during a virtual event hosted by INSA.

The initiative, which kicked off in 2018, has released minimum viable products in recent years, and it’s been designated a major acquisition program by the Pentagon. Officials have said that it’s expected to reach full operational capability in 2025.

Migrating the use of the technology to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) is an important step in expanding the use of these types of tools, and agency officials are awaiting authority to operate there.

“We expect that MARS will be ATO’d on SIPR within the next few weeks, actually. So that assessment is underway right now. It’s going well,” Cossa said.

The zero-trust cybersecurity framework is a key element of the organization’s vision for MARS, he noted.

“One area where we have really put emphasis on is part of zero trust. And so the investments that DIA has received in zero trust over the past year and in FY ’25 we’re actually putting towards MARS. So MARS is … the first program out of the gate that will actually use our fine-grained entitlements as part of our zero-trust strategy,” Cossa said.

“Our zero-trust strategy and our data strategy go hand in hand. And so when I say ‘zero trust’ as it relates to MARS, we’re looking at how do we ensure that all of the sources that MARS pulls from all around the IC and DOD for foundational military intelligence, one, intersect with MARS[and] integrate with MARS, but two, we can ensure the integrity of that data as it moves in and out of different environments. That actually is being done through our zero-trust strategy, through our fine-grained entitlements as well to making sure the right people receive it,” he added.

Looking ahead, the agency hopes that the zero-trust framework will make MARS and other capabilities easier to use more broadly.

“When you think about what that means for MARS, but also all of our systems into the future, especially with international partners today, what we do is we have individual networks, whether it’s Stone Ghosts for the Five Eyes [intelligence partnership between the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada] or any of the other individual bilat systems that we run,” Cossa said. “What the strategy is is we put those in containers and we deploy applications such as MARS on those different infrastructures.”

However: “When we think about where zero trust brings us, it means that in entitlements and how we ensure the integrity of that data, not only at the user level but at the device level, it means that we don’t need these disparate networks anymore. We can actually host data in one place and regulate and control and secure access through those fine-grained entitlements for both users and devices,” he said. “That’s the future of where we’re going. And so, you know, when we say we’re going to put MARS on SIPR, yeah, we’re going to, but what we want to see in the future and really the objective is, is we don’t have to deploy to different networks. We deploy in one area and we manage the accesses through entitlements.”