By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 18, 2012 – The NATO
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance community kicked off a
first-of-its-kind technical trial today in Norway to help in preserving gains
made during the past decade of conflict and to build on them for the future.
U.S. Air Force and Army representatives
have joined their counterparts from 12 countries and seven NATO organizations
for the 10-day Unified Vision 2012, Dennis Lynn, the Air Force lead and senior
U.S. national representative at the trial, told American Forces Press Service.
Operating at Oerland Air Station,
Norway, and at other locations in the United States and Europe, the 700
participants will be put through the paces during 27 dynamic, fast-moving
vignettes, all based on real-world missions, he said.
As they marshal their full range of
human and electronic –intelligence capabilities, they will determine how well
they identify, track and analyze threat information, explained Richard
Wittstruck, chairman of NATO’s joint ISR capability group and the senior Army
official at the trial.
Forming a cohesive intelligence picture
is a big part of the trial, but equally important will be how easily
participants can share it. “The core of Unified Vision 12 is our ability to
share sensor data among the allies,” Lynn said.
Historically, he added, that’s been a
challenge because of the many different systems involved, the technical
challenges of processing and cataloging such a vast amount of data, and the
inherent tendency of operators to “stovepipe” information to protect it.
“So it’s a very difficult thing to do,
but we are slowly evolving and slowly improving our ability to do that,” Lynn
said. “We still do it imperfectly, but it is better than it was 10 years ago.”
A big goal of the trial is to identify gaps
in information-gathering and dissemination and to help in charting the way
ahead for future technological advancements or new tactics, techniques and
procedures, Wittstruck said.
Toward that goal, the Norwegian
military, which is hosting Unified Vision, has gone all-out to make it as
realistic and valuable as possible, he said. The Norwegians will turn on real
surface-to-air missile systems so participants can attempt to geo-locate them.
A Norwegian navy frigate will
participate, collaborating with ground and air assets to identify and engage
targets. “That’s something we haven’t practiced a lot,” Wittstruck said. “You
talk air-to-ground and ground-to-ground, but in my history of doing this for
over 25 years, it is rare to see an opportunity where you have a maritime asset
cooperating with air and ground, looking at the same targets and trying to
build that threat envelope.”
Norway also has authorized participants
to turn on active GPS jammers for part of the exercise -- something impossible
to do in most parts of the world, where it would interfere with commercial and
industrial operations. The players will have to identify where these jammers
are and whether they need to be neutralized, while conducting their own
intelligence efforts using backup systems not reliant on GPS signals.
To compensate for the one drawback of
the Norwegian venue -- 21 hours of daily sunlight that preclude night
operations -- an element based at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz., will prosecute
targets from what’s being billed during the trial as “Forward Operating Base
Alpha.”
Just as in real–world operations, the
participants will encounter some curve balls, Wittstruck said. In some
scenarios, the human intelligence they receive may be flawed. They could
encounter “enemy” aircraft or weapons systems on the ground that turn out to be
decoys with the exact same target signatures -- or real systems that have been
concealed by camouflage nets.
As the participants navigate these
challenges, they’ll help to ensure that standard agreements in place to promote
data-sharing across NATO cover new systems coming online and actually work in
an operational setting, Wittstruck said. They’ll work through obstacles to
sharing data that crosses classification domains -- from secret to unclassified
or unclassified to secret -- to help maximize what can be shared.
“The big question will be, Can we touch
each other in terms of data exchange so we have a composite, if not fused,
picture of the situation on the same target, in the same vignette because you
have given me your aspect and I have given you my aspect?” Wittstruck said.
“That should heighten everyone’s situational awareness.”
He cited the many good lessons operating
in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade that have improved this
capability. “So the question is, How do we capture the good lessons learned and
institutionalize them so we don’t have to relearn them or rediscover them in
the next NATO campaign?” he said.
NATO overcame many difficulties to stand
up the Afghan Mission Network so coalition members could share intelligence
data in Afghanistan, Wittstruck noted. That system, which reached full
operational capability only last year, helped to bridge the intelligence gap
created by numerous national intelligence networks with different levels of
interoperability. It allows the United States and 45 partners in the NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force to link up over a common mission
network.
“We learned so much from that network,
once it was up, about the true cooperation that can take place without having a
whole bunch of liaison officers sitting around a table trying to exchange the
data person-to-person because they didn’t have the digital means to have a
common view of all the data,” Wittstruck said.
“The Afghan Mission Network was a great
step forward,” he said. “But the lesson out of that was, Do we really want to
create a mission network from scratch every time we go to a new NATO campaign?
And the answer is obviously not.”
Lynn recognized NATO’s growing
appreciation of the need for a common ISR platform. At the recent NATO Summit in
Chicago, for example, the allies announced that they had contracted for a new,
NATO-owned and -operated ground surveillance system. Based on Global Hawk
unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with advanced ground-surveillance radars, the
system will enable every NATO ally to access the data collected.
“That’s going to be a big help to NATO’s
joint ISR system,” said Lynn, who acknowledged that the new system won’t be
operational for at least a couple of years.
Wittstruck said the aggressive 12-month
planning timeline NATO adopted for Unified Vision shows its commitment to
moving this process forward. “This, by far, has been the most productive year
of watching the nations and the NATO agencies come together -- the leadership
and workforce -- to rally to this,” he said. “They really are committed to the
cause of getting lessons learned codified and institutionalized for future use
and identifying those gaps so that we can get after them with either material,
technical or non-material investments.”
Planners recognize going into the trial
that not everything they put to the test is going to go as planned. “A trial
can be successful even if 80 percent of the things go wrong, because you are
gaining knowledge,” Lynn said. “It’s like a scientific experiment. You know it
works or it doesn’t work.”
“Part of the success of this trial may
be the failure of aspects of it,” Wittstruck agreed. “If we set out to do
something and can’t do it and we learn something from that, we can improve
NATO’s effectiveness and efficiencies moving forward, which is a success in
itself.”
Lynn said he’s optimistic about the
outcome. “By working with the multitude of nations we have at this trial, we
expect to make real progress,” he said. “I think we can make some far-reaching
improvements as we move ahead on this.”
It’s an effort he called vital to future
NATO operations. “ISR is absolutely critical to fighting the modern war. You
need it,” Lynn said. “So this trial will help us improve that timeliness and
the availability of that data by putting it in a standard way so everyone will
be able to get access to the information in some kind of central repository and
be able to disseminate it in a timely way.
“The idea is you can’t wait until the
next war starts,” he continued. “You need to be focused on this and continually
advancing it, because this work is absolutely foundational to everything we as
a coalition do.”
Wittstruck said the efforts will
strengthen NATO’s ability to operate as a joint ISR community. “And if we can
do that, that is a big win for NATO,” he said.
But the biggest winners, Lynn said,
ultimately will be the warfighters who will use and benefit from these systems.
“Too many times, somebody may have had a piece of information that would have
helped another unit or another aircraft, say, out of harm’s way,” he said,
“because at the end of the day, the ability to share information is about
saving lives.”
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