NATO and Sweden Joint Live Experiment on NEC

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Abstract:

The overall objective for the project was to test if a “service oriented architecture” could facilitate the vision in the NATO NEC Feasibility Study, that states “Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) involves the linking together of sensors, decision makers, and weapon systems, as well as multinational military, governmental, and non-governmental agencies in a seamless, collaborative, planning, assessment and execution environment.” The idea was to see if the utilization of NATO NEC developments together with Swedish NDB results could bring about new techniques that were more flexible and dynamic in its support of civil military co-operation and the Comprehensive Approach. The result of the live experiment was overwhelming, in about some six month the project team succeeded to federate together some 30 different types of information and C2 systems were both civil and military units could share the same operational picture and retrieve it from their own specialized systems. The federated system consisted of fully blown operational systems as the NATO AWAC to system on the experimental level. A main contributor to the success was the utilization of a Service Oriented Architecture. To verify the operational side of NEC, four different vignettes were created under the umbrella of the protection of a high level meeting in the Swedish city of Göteborg. Operating together in the scenarios was several different NATO entities, Swedish military units, the Swedish Police, the Swedish Rescue Service, Swedish SOS Alarm (911/112 functionality) and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. The federated information sharing environment was accredited by both Swedish and NATO Security Authorities.