The U.K. and Ukraine recently announced a new defense AI partnership that will give British researchers access to millions of images collected from the Ukrainian battlefield. The agreement is an example of how warfare has changed. Information collected by one military can cross borders, inform another nation’s AI systems, and ultimately influence decisions on the battlefield. All of this at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago.
For centuries, cities protected what mattered most by building walls around them. Guards controlled gates, deciding who could enter and when they could leave. As cities expanded and commerce moved beyond the walls, security had to evolve. The walls did not disappear; they remained an important layer of protection. However, it was clear that walls could no longer be the only defense.
Our approach to cybersecurity is confronting a similar transformation. For years, cybersecurity has largely been judged by how effectively we keep adversaries out. Increasingly, our national security will also depend on how effectively we let the right information through. The U.S. military needs to be able to share data, not just protect it: with allies, between services, classification domains, defense companies, and AI systems. On the battlefield, information that arrives too late can be almost as useless as information that never arrives at all. We cannot simply lock everything away. We must allow data to move, while maintaining trust and control.
The Pentagon is confronting these issues head-on. Its “War Data Platform” modernization efforts include secure cross-domain sharing and interoperability, while the Army recently established a common data-layer baseline for its Next Generation Command program. The FY2026 defense budget also calls for investments in rapid mission-partner information sharing and a shift from network-centric toward data-centric security management.
The Pentagon has identified the problem and as is often the case, the effort to solve it is driving innovation across industry. Two companies tackling different parts of this challenge are Everfox and Virtru.
Everfox’s heritage is in protecting some of the government’s most sensitive environments for the last twenty-five years. Today, its Cross Domain Solutions help authorized information move securely between networks, domains, and users. This allows critical information to cross security boundaries to get to the right people so they can make decisions and act, while helping prevent unauthorized data from doing the same. This is an increasingly important capability as military operations become more interconnected and coalition based. Information collected in one environment may need to reach another service, intelligence partner, or an allied military operating on a different network or at a different classification level. In that environment, security cannot simply be about keeping information inside a protected system. It must also provide trusted pathways for information to move securely between systems.
Virtru grew directly out of this challenge. Its founders, brothers John and Will Ackerly, saw the problem firsthand while working in government. They saw how security requirements could leave critical information trapped in organizational silos, making it difficult to share with the people who needed it. While at the NSA, Will helped develop the Trusted Data Format (TDF), an approach that allows security and access controls to travel with the data itself. Virtru has built on that concept, allowing organizations to maintain control over who can access information even as it moves beyond the network where it originated. That capability becomes increasingly relevant as sensitive information moves among government agencies, contractors, cloud environments, and allied partners. Protecting the network where information begins its journey is critical, but so is maintaining control over the information after it leaves.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) only raises the stakes. As AI becomes more integrated into national security operations, its effectiveness will increasingly depend on access to trusted data that can move securely across systems, organizations, and allies.
The lesson is not that walls no longer matter. They do. Technology’s impact on today’s operational environment demands an entirely different question: How do we protect data that must move across many walls?
The new U.K.-Ukraine partnership offers a glimpse of what this looks like in practice. Millions of pieces of battlefield data collected by one country will now help another develop and improve the next generation of military AI. Tomorrow, similar information will increasingly move among allies, military services, defense companies, cloud environments, and AI systems. The strategic advantage will not simply belong to the nation that collects the most data. It will belong to the nations that can securely put trusted data to use.
U.S. military advantage increasingly depends on moving trusted information across services, systems, companies, and allies faster than our adversaries, without sacrificing security. That means protecting networks, controlling how information moves between them, and maintaining protection over the data itself.
Technology is not going to slow down to accommodate security systems built for an earlier era. Neither will our adversaries. Our security architecture must evolve just as quickly.
Jeremy Bayer is the founder of 202 Consulting and a 25-year veteran of Washington’s business and public policy community. He advises companies and organizations on public policy, national security, and strategic engagement.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
