The Mission Partner Environment: Challenges To Multinational Information Sharing

The need for U.S. forces, and the Army in particular, to conduct operations in complex environments integrated with multinational partners is well founded both in contemporary experiences and strategic guidance. In order to synchronize with these mission partners, U.S. forces must be willing and able to share digital information at operational and tactical levels with trusted coalition forces. In spite of this widely recognized requirement, the U.S. Army still has no single interoperable allied mission network available for rapid deployment. As a result, Army organizations are unable to realize the full potential of the Regionally Aligned Forces RAF initiative or mission command doctrine. The lack of a sustainable coalition network, or Mission Partner Environment MPE, further prevents Army units from rapidly integrating or maintaining command and control with multinational partners as required by combatant commanders. This study reviews the history of these shortcomings and explores the Afghanistan experience to support specific recommendations for the emerging MPE. The relative success of the Afghan Mission Network AMN makes the case for the using common operational priorities mission threads as the basis for network security architecture. This examination will show the MPE must be included and prioritized within Army network programs of record and that policy must shift to allow more flexible risk assessment with respect to information sharing in support of current and future multinational operations.