When the Defense Department transferred the oversight and management of its Mission Partner Environment to the Defense Information Systems Agency from the Air Force last year, the clock started ticking.

By early 2027, DISA expects to have moved the focus of the MPE to a data-centric approach from a network-centric architecture.

That change will not be easy.

Chris Barnhurst, DISA’s deputy director, said earlier this year at an AFCEA lunch that the data-centric architecture must include zero trust controls that enable the right people to access the right data at the right time.

“We have an identity credential and access management solution. We have zero trust capabilities deployed globally across our data centers and within the commercial clouds we are using. We have all the ingredients we need to develop and deploy a data centric architecture,” he said. “We are initially focused on INDOPACOM first, leveraging departmentwide exercises to test and prove out capabilities and then we will iterate.”

The good news for DISA is that the Air Force gave them a running start with the MPE.

Nic Creswell, the portfolio acquisition executive for the Mission Partner Environment at DISA, said over the past five years, the Air Force has made a lot of progress in setting up the basic infrastructure and foundational elements.

Nic Creswell is the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for the Mission Partner Environment at the Defense Information Systems Agency (Photo courtesy of DISA).

“As we move those things over, we’re doing it very deliberately. We’re moving the work, and then we’re actively talking about some of the functional transition as well,” Creswell said during a press briefing held at the recent AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference, an excerpt of which was played on Ask the CIO. “We are actively starting to move some of the individuals along with the resourcing now with under the purview of the PAE for us to continue not only the operations that we have in the environment today, what we call the [existing] portfolio. Then also, how do we start to accelerate toward transformation and really start to align around the key activities that have been thought about or were started that now we’re starting to shape under the purview of the agency and then ultimately as part of our portfolio.”

Creswell said two Air Force-developed capabilities are already moving over. One is the Secret and Below Releasable Environment (SABRE), which came over in January. SABRE is a cloud-based platform that lets the U.S. and allies share classified information and collaborate in real time.

“There were some capability areas that were then morphed into the demonstration article that was taken to the Keen Edge [exercise] earlier this year. We’ve since taken the pieces and parts of that and decomposed it into our capability, which is Coalition Information Environment. CIE is the new program that is being stood up for this,” he said. “Anything that is non-intelligence related really is focused on command and control information and collaboration capability sets that has been in the department. We’re doing right now a heavy lift of how do we bring those things in under the cognizance of the PAE.”

Technology incubator coming soon

Creswell said some of the other capabilities that have transitioned over are ones initiated by NATO, and his goal is to get them further down the field and into production.

“Over time, as you can probably imagine, a lot of the Global War on Terror and other kinds of things, networks were built out of necessity. So there were a lot of these vertically, which is what we term as vertically integrated networks that are very domain specific have been created to establish connections with our mission partners and with our allies. We are bringing all of those in under our purview,” he said. “We have a lot of the what they call Combined Federated Battle Laboratories Network (CFBLNet), so we’re bringing CFBLNet in under our purview. Pegasus is another example, which is our how we interoperate with our Five Eyes with our coalition. There’s a lot of these kind of examples of these environments that have grown, that were under Air Force and or other parts of the department that are now being coalesced in under the PAE.”

DoD launched the MPE in early 2020 with the goal of establishing a secure network where DoD and allies can share unclassified and classified data and plan and executive joint operations. In a 2025 guide to commanders, the Army said MPE integrates three main components:

• Human domain solutions to foster relationships and build trust.
• Procedure domain solutions to establish common processes, controls and standards.
• Technical domain solutions to enable secure and timely information sharing.

“While a successful MPE is not a guarantee of mission success, it is a critical factor in achieving shared understanding, mutual trust and unity of effort among partners,” wrote Army Brig. Gen. Bryan Babich, the director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence, in that guide.

One way DISA is advancing the capabilities under MPE is through a new technology incubator.

Creswell said the incubator office is just getting up and running in the later part of 2026.

“We’re the integration of integration PAEs, so we have an opportunity to look uniquely at industry and look at some of the non-traditional technologies that maybe the others the other big PAEs aren’t able to, or they are just not quite a fit,” he said. “We’re really looking for the best breed of what industry has to offer us. We’re trying to build that in a way that allows them to do development in a purposeful way, while at the same time explore new things that might be made available to us.”

Series of minimum viable capabilities releases

While DISA is trying to repurpose some of the capabilities inherited from the Air Force, Creswell said the agency also is open to new and emerging technologies that would make information sharing easier and more secure.

“There’s an opportunity to have unsolicited ideas and capabilities brought in, and then we will also be doing industry engagement and outreach, which then will ask industry to come and participate with us to be able to demonstrate what they are describing,” he said. “We are trying to move beyond the PowerPoint. We are moving beyond just the words and the briefings. This is really about how do we put functionally relevant capability into an environment, and be able to demonstrate how it’s going to perform in our technical baseline.”

Creswell said over the next year, DISA will complete a series of minimum viable capabilities releases (MVCR) under MPE. He said they are using agile development methodology to build, test, iterate and deploy at scale.

“We’re pulling talent from parts of our counterpart program executive offices into this really integrated cross-functional team. What it looks like in terms of delivery is our first MVCR is slated for the beginning of next year,” he said. “We are focused very deliberately within the INDOPACOM areas of responsibility, but we are looking to scale out as fast as we possibly can because we’re using an agile approach and infrastructure as code mentality. We’re looking to go to low-touch provisioning as we start to look beyond just where we currently are focused with this first minimum viable capability. So, as you look at a year from now, we are intending that we’re going to have functionally relevant operational systems in the hands of our geographic combatant command in a very short period of time.”

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