DoD’s Mission Partner Environment – Information System (MPE-IS)

    The Challenge

    On any given day, the Department of Defense must be prepared to address a wide range of security challenges including military and stability operations, counter-insurgency missions, and disaster/humanitarian contingencies. Success depends upon on the ability of cooperative mission partners to combine quickly, integrate fluidly, and operate seamlessly.

    The current approach of unique systems with stove-piped data sources is a high risk, high cost approach. It ensures long developmental lead times and fragile solutions that cannot be transferred to other operations.

    The Solution

    DoD CIO accelerated the Mission Partner Environment – Information System (MPE-IS) engineering and architecture design work in February 2015 to address initial operational requirements and achieve implementation in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016. The design applies modern virtualization technologies and processes to improve warfighter agility and reduce costs.

    MPE-IS will be globally available to support episodic and enduring mission network requirements, and will support an estimated 45,000 users with basic human-to-human services, such as chat, email with attachments, web, file-share, and other services, like command and control (C2), weather, logistics, and planning. MPE-IS:

    • Simplifies/standardizes information sharing through virtualization technologies
    • Eliminates costly and slow mission-specific build-outs.
    • Operates at a variety of classification/releasability levels
    • Is comprised of DoD and mission partner-provided infrastructure, services, and agreed upon procedures
    • Allows the team to aggregate, reconfigure, and disaggregate as required
    • Is scalable and can support small enclave to major multi-nation coalition operations
    • Frees planners to focus on unique mission capability needs by using a shared suite of utility-like services, such as email, chat, voice, or video teleconferencing (VTC)

    Components of MPE-IS

    Each component, when integrated together, provides the materiel solution that will support the full range of multinational military operations.

    • Virtual Data Center - provides computer and storage resources for multiple crypto-logically separated mission secret enclaves
    • Common Mission Network Transport - provides encrypted transport
    • Services and Applications - provides core human-to-human information sharing services, underlying utility services, and virtual hosting for C2 mission applications
    • Cross Domain Solutions - allows for ingest of C2, Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), and cybersecurity data to flow between the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and mission enclaves
    • Gateways - provides network transport peering point and perimeter security for information exchanges with partners
    • Clients - provides end-user access to services and data, to include thick, thin, mobile, and multi-enclave devices
    • Global and extension nodes - support global and regional mission requirements for each Command

    Current Status

    Two global MPE-IS nodes are operational supporting MPE-IS capabilities in the U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command, and U.S. Africa Command areas of responsibility. Additional nodes are in-development for U.S. Pacific Command. The DoD Chief Information Officer (DoD CIO) is collaborating with the Combatant Commanders to build delivery design proposals for increasing this capability across all commands.