The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) Command and Control (C2) and Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Service Line supported the recent Army Network Evaluation (NIE) – Bold Quest 15.2 Coalition Capability Demonstration and Assessment, conducted from 9 September - 9 October 2015, at Fort Bliss, Texas, as well as White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Providing invaluable support
The support of the C2 and IV&V SL in the ground-to-air situational awareness area greatly enhance operations, benefited the other nation participants and supported all phases of the Bold Quest Operational Demonstration. The NCI Agency's efforts and leadership helped form a coalition to develop and test emerging Draft Ground-to-Air Situational (G2A) STANAG 5528/ADatP-37 Services to Forward Friendly Force Information to Weapon Delivery Assets and STANAG 5527/ADatP-36 (Draft Edition 1 Version 1) Friendly Force Tracking Systems (FFTS) Interoperability for the join and coalition communities.
G2A addresses the operational requirement from Allied Command Operations (ACO) of having relevant, real-time information about their operating area – the targets, potential threats, near-by friendly and neutral forces, and non-combatant personnel and facilities – by forwarding friendly situational awareness (SA) information from NATO Force Tracking Systems (FTS), Command and Control (C2) systems, and other identification systems, including Combat Identification (CID) systems, to weapon delivery assets and other attack-associated units to reduce the risk of fratricide and collateral damage.
The NCI Agency together with USA Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Assessment Division (C4AD) conducted four weeks of testing and assessment of CID and FFT platforms from Denmark, France, Italy, Netherland, Poland and the United States of America. The NCI Agency C2 Interoperability Test and Assessment (IOTA) tools, a deliverable of the ACT Program of Work, were used as the backbone of Bold Quest 15.2 to assess STANAG compliancy and system interoperability.
As a result of the combination of the effort from the NCI Agency C2/IV&V Service Line, USA C4AD personnel, assessment plan and IOTA tool, national systems got immediate feedback about the level of implementation of the NATO Standards, while NATO bodies received important recommendations and observations from the testers, operators and user community about the maturity of the draft STANAG 5527 and STANAG 5528