What interested you in joining the agency?
My first time in NATO, at that time the Agency didn't exist. I was in a CIS support group of the Joint Command Southwest. This was 1999. This changed my whole career to something quite new and quite real and interesting. I participated in the creation of this CIS unit that was going to support a newly created NATO headquarters. This was very challenging, but it was a unique experience for me. These are times where there are a lot of things to do, nothing is clear, but you have a clear target. Everybody is focused on a clear target, that is, to make this unit begin to work.
Before applying to my current position, I was sent to Torrejon by the Agency in November 2012. My mission was to set up all the Air Command and Control applications, tools and services, that the future CAOC Torrejon was going to need to perform their air policing mission. I came together with another colleague and we just unpacked the servers and began to set up all of the functionality, all of the services and the related applications. It was very interesting work.
The thing I like most is to create, and mainly when there is nothing. When you have to begin from scratch to do something, creativity is something you need to bring to the place. Teamwork is also needed. I think the beginnings are very good. There is no routine. I like, in fact, to be challenged.
In Torrejon, every day there is a challenge. Every day we face the critical mission that we run here and I think this keeps you alive. You don't get bored, you always have to think about how to improve the services we provide, and I like that a lot.
How does your team support NATO's air policing mission?
We are a team of around 40 members. Most of us are highly experienced and qualified technicians. We provide 24/7 support to allow the Static Air Defence Centre to perform its mission of air policing.
We provide secure communications, voice and data. This includes not only radios, voice-over-IP, secure and non-secure analogue telephones, but also all the specific tools that are based on NATO and commercial off-the-shelf software. There are many tools that we support and these tools help the CAOC, mainly to build up a recognized air picture. We also provide technical support and advice to the operational community about requirements they may need in the future.
Why is the recognized air picture so important?
The recognized air picture, at the end of the day, is the collection of all of the tracks that are in the area of responsibility of the CAOC in Torrejon. And a track is an aircraft in flight, together with all its details. The area of responsibility of CAOC Torrejon goes from the Azores Island in the Atlantic up to the east of Turkey. So when you see this area on the map, you get a pretty good idea of the importance of the mission that the CSU has in support of the CAOC's operations. This is why all CSU Torrejon members are so focused on guaranteeing that not only can they open any of these applications today, but we guarantee that they will be able to open it in every single moment.
Are you contributing to any initiatives to improve services the CSU delivers?
Since I arrived here in 2012 one of my priorities has been to ensure the reliability of the services we deliver.
We have to be able to solve any technical issue that affects CAOC operations in one hour. This is not so easy, and you cannot depend just on the knowledge of the technician who is on duty to fix everything. So you need to set up the services in a way that if any piece of hardware or software fails you have a redundancy in place that will avoid service outage.
One example of this is the improvement of the server infrastructure in CAOC Torrejon. It has improved very much and this has had a direct effect on the users. We took advantage of some infrastructure that was available and we set up a solution that is fully redundant, with high availability. This increased the performance of the applications and gave us the possibility to greatly reduce, and in some cases, completely eliminate the downtime of services.
Just to give you an example of this "downtime," it happens to you with your computer at home. Every now and then you receive patches, and you need to update the computer. When you update it, you have to restart the computer.
This happens mostly every month, and it happens to us too. We need to provide a secure means to do so to minimize the impact to the CAOC. The effect of this improvement, that was led by the CSU, has had a very good effect on the availability of the services we provide to our customer.
From CSU Torrejon, we will continue working to keep NATO's skies a safe place.
