AFMC Command News

Interoperability demo binds coalition forces for common warfighter value

  • Published
  • By Charles Paone
  • Electronic Systems Center Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --  When U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Curt Harvey was deployed to the air operations center in Southwest Asia, he was struck by the challenge of working and sharing data with various coalition-nation partners.

Now, as the combined forces air component commander for this year's Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration, or CWID, he's been encouraged by the participation of so many of those allied nations.

"Everyone here is committed to figuring out how to work together more efficiently," he said. "That's really important, because when we have that ability, it makes us all exponentially better."

CWID is an annual event sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and directed by U.S. Joint Forces Command. The event features what are known as interoperability trials, in which operators assess technologies at various stages of development to determine their potential for meeting critical warfighting needs.

This year, 23 nations are participating, which creates a significant opportunity for international operators to jointly evaluate technology solutions and to seek out innovative ways to work cooperatively during contingency and wartime operations.

Hanscom AFB, where the Air Force's Electronic Systems Center is headquartered, is once again serving as the sole Air Force site - and one of 17 participating sites worldwide - for the demonstration, which began June 11 and runs through June 21.

Hanscom's Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance enterprise integration facility is serving as a small-scale combined air operations center and is buzzing with a variety of activity each day.

"We're running about three times the number of interoperability trials we did last year, and we've got about 50 people on the floor working," said Hanscom's CWID site manager, Capt. Jesse Jaramillo.

The 20 trials Hanscom is hosting are among the nearly 200 being conducted throughout the entire demonstration. They're all loosely tied together through scripted scenarios, and information is shared among the sites through a distributed communications network.

"This is a demonstration, not an exercise, test or even an experiment," Colonel Harvey said. "We run everything off a script. Our job is to follow the script and make sure we really demonstrate the capabilities of the items we're trying out."

The only real "curve balls" come when technologies don't work.

"Then our job is to try to figure out why and get it fixed, so we can go back to evaluating the technology," the colonel said.

Although there are numerous benefits, the main objective is to come away with solid assessments of which technologies deserve more exploration, or even immediate fielding, and which ones don't.

For ESC, that means focusing on far more than providing the site and coordinating activities within it.

"This is a real opportunity for us to demonstrate to Joint Forces Command and our coalition partners some of the incredible materiel solutions we provide," said Col. Leslie Blackham, commander of the 753rd Electronic Systems Group, the center's lead CWID organization.

The coalition piece, she said, allows ESC to demonstrate force multipliers. Those are the tools that enable coalition forces to work together more productively. One example is software that allows an air tasking order, produced in a U.S. format, to be translated into a NATO format. This allows NATO forces to execute the tasking order with the same machine-to-machine interoperability available to their U.S. counterparts.

CWID is also a proving ground for ESC systems and capabilities, Colonel Blackham said. In some cases, the demonstration tests technologies in the early stages of development; in others cases, it tests the most recent versions of existing products, such as the Theater Battle Management Core Systems, which are constantly being upgraded.

Some of the positives already identified by Colonel Harvey include a system that enables data to be transferred between different security levels, new collaborative mission planning software and a dynamic re-planning tool that incorporates live data feeds from aircraft.