Navy looking to increase cyber partnerships with foreign nations

The Navy wants to increase its collaboration in the cyber domain with allies and other international partners to improve interoperability and the sharing of tactics.

The department’s first cyber strategy, released in November, calls for greater cooperation between the organization and foreign countries.

“We will engage with Allied and friendly nations to exchange best practices, share appropriate information, and coordinate our efforts in cyberspace,” it states.

Officials noted that there is a lot to be gained, in terms of tactics and tools, through greater partnership.

“We share our tools, we share the intelligence — and so the better integrated we are, the more successful we will be. A big part of this, again, is learning from each other. We learn as much from them as they learned from us,” Scott St. Pierre, the Department of the Navy’s acting principal cyber advisor, told reporters during a media call Friday. “Our allied coalition partners bring intelligence, they bring unique ways of looking at both defensive cyber operations as well as offensive cyber operations.”

Officials in the past have noted that in many cases, allies and partners may have certain capabilities, access and even authorities that are not immediately available to the U.S. Teaming up with these nations to understand capabilities, accesses and targets improves operations because in some cases these countries can act when the U.S. might not be able to.

St. Pierre noted that this push for greater international cooperation is in line with efforts by U.S. Cyber Command.

“That integrated approach is one of the key elements that U.S. Cyber Command is working, as well as each of the component cyber commands,” he said. “They work with joint and allied partners every single day in a cooperative fashion. It’s been tremendously beneficial to help moving us forward not only on establishing the right defensive postures, but also learning from what they know in terms of the intel they collected and how they actually execute offensive cyber operations.”

In fact, Cybercom’s leader Gen. Paul Nakasone has made international partnerships a key pillar of the…