By Robert K. Ackerman
Signal Magazine, 05 January 2006
The greatest challenge facing NATO interoperability is the desire of individual nations to safeguard information and technology from their allies, according to the general manager of the agency tasked with enabling coalition interoperability.
Nations with extensive data collection and processing systems are reluctant to share all elements of detailed information with even longtime allies, lest sensitive intelligence and technology aspects are revealed. And, many useful information technologies and systems developed by an individual nation are subject to export controls, which hinders their acceptance and implementation by other NATO nations.
Ensuring coalition interoperability amid these conditions is complicated by the military transformation that is empowered by the rapid evolution of information technologies. The NATO Consultation, Command and Control (C3) Agency, or NC3A, is striving to enable coalition interoperability both through technological advances and by overcoming the political-cultural barriers that hinder interoperable military operations.
The NC3A faces a tougher task than its national equivalents because it must bring together systems that are designed to address national needs, which often differ widely even among member nations. Not only must these systems interoperate among other national systems, they also must interoperate with NATO systems and networks.
Dag Wilhelmsen, NC3A general manager, offers that the agency hopes to allow the alliance to address coalition interoperability through “the ability to operate as an unbiased coherent agent.” The NC3A would be able to assist nations in finding good, workable solutions between national systems and international infrastructures.
Wilhelmsen categorizes the challenge of achieving coalition interoperability into three different areas: the technical area, which focuses on architectures and standards; the programmatic area, which involves affecting national programs to achieve interoperability; and the political and cultural levels.
The NC3A general manager is unhesitating in his declaration that the political and cultural arenas pose the greatest challenge to NATO coalition interoperability. The ability to establish multilateral, trusted information-sharing environments that can be effective in a coalition setting hinges on solving that challenge, he states.
The political consensus that drives a coalition to function in an operation is not necessarily a permanent and fully multilateral base, Wilhelmsen continues. In many cases, a set of bilateral arrangements must be established to share information across a set of shared bilateral links. “That is obviously a very ineffective and difficult way to establish effective coalition operations,” Wilhelmsen emphasizes.
So, the cultural challenge is to establish a coalition setting where all the participants in the coalition will trust a common domain of information that can be shared by all participants, he says. Achieving that goal will require providing a secure information-sharing environment that is transparent enough for all the participants to understand that their information is protected fully.
This is more than just a focus on multilevel security concerns. Wilhelmsen suggests that NATO members agree on the goal, but they each see different priorities on the path to achieving that goal. This is why it is easier to agree on an ad hoc arrangement than on a permanent solution.
But the other areas pose challenges of their own. For the technical area, the agency is striving to create templates for new architectures that are service-oriented rather than system-design-oriented.
The programmatic area is where the technology gap rears its head. The United States is far ahead of even its most technologically capable allies, and many new and incoming NATO members are using obsolete 1960s and 1970s technologies. Wilhelmsen notes that the agency continues to assess the capability maturity of technologies that member nations bring to the coalition arena.
One useful tool in meeting the alliance’s interoperability challenges is the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration, or CWID (SIGNAL Magazine, September 2005, page 71). Wilhelmsen offers that the key lessons that NATO continues to learn from CWID and its predecessors come from being able to bring together diverse national systems early enough in their development to allow changes for interoperability.
Two programs in particular benefited from CWID 2005. One, the Coalition Friendly Force Tracking Standard, is receiving its first trial with five nations’ systems being interconnected in NATO operations in Afghanistan. The next phase will be to establish a standard agreement for these systems to have a shared information exchange standard across systems.
The other program involves battlespace command and control systems working together using the Multilateral Interoperability Program, or MIP, standard. The ongoing MIP effort is furthering data exchange mechanisms through additional test programs. Wilhelmsen relates that NATO is establishing an experiment for MIP implementation in Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO systems have begun a validation process for information exchange in a fielded environment.
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Citation: Robert K. Ackerman. "In NATO, Technology Challenges Yield to Political Interoperability Hurdles," Signal Magazine, 05 January 2006.
Original URL: http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/mod_print_view.cfm?this_id=509437&u=signal&issue_id=000103968&show=F,T,T,T,F,Article,F,F,F,F,T,T,F,F,T,T
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