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Norwegian armed forces, battle lab host Coalition Combat Identification test

The preparation process for Bold Quest 2011 begins this month in Norway.  U.S., U.K. and Norwegian warfighters and analysts will test combat identification servers and interfaces during a 10-day event near Oslo.

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By Jacob Boyer
USJCOM Public Affairs

(CAMP RENA, Norway – Sept. 7, 2010) -- Warfighters and analysts from the United States, Norway and the United Kingdom will test combat identification (CID) systems this month in Norway as part of a U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) campaign to improve fires near dismounted ground forces. 

Bold Quest 10-Norway involves testing of U.S. and U.K. CID servers, ensuring that Norwegian ground and air forces can communicate with the servers and with each other, said John Miller, the Joint Capability Integration and Fires Division’s Bold Quest operational manager.  The event continues through Sept. 17 at Camp Rena, a major Norwegian armed forces training and testing center north of Oslo. 

USJFCOM’s coalition CID capability assessments, known as the Bold Quest series, provide a globally recognized forum for this work.  The Norwegian armed forces were involved in Bold Quest 2009, and offered to host Bold Quest testing in 2010 soon afterward.  They will provide ground and air elements, instrumentation, control facilities and logistical support for all participants.

“We always have preliminary testing prior to a major Bold Quest operational demonstration,” Miller said.  “There’s nothing new to the approach.  There are precedents being set in the sense that for the first time we have another country – in this case, Norway – offering to host a significant preliminary test that involves a few nations.”

Bold Quest 2011 will focus on  issues associated with CID related to fires on dismounts, which Miller said was relevant to operations today.  Those fires could come from a variety of sources, including other dismounted warfighters, artillery, mortars or close air support.

The U.S. has been developing and testing its CID Server since Bold Quest’s 2007 iteration, Miller said.  The server takes in ground force location information from a variety of sources,  like blue force tracker,  then stores and updates the information so it is  available on demand to  elements providing supporting  fires, notably coalition aircrew, joint terminal air controllers and fires coordinators.

Norwegian F-16 aircrew, infantry and special operations forces will  support these functions during this month’s test through multiple scenarios that represent  current operations, Miller said   They will be joined by U.S. and U.K. joint terminal air controllers operating their own equipment.

“For aircrew, that information will be displayed in the cockpit and accelerate the engagement of targets and avoid fratricide to any friendly forces in the vicinity of that target,” he said.

The United Kingdom started working on its own CID Server about a year ago, according to Miller.  The event  is the first test in an operational environment alongside its U.S. counterpart.

“This will be the first time the U.K. server has been in a test environment like this,” he said.  “It will be very interesting to see the two servers exchanging information with each other, as they might in an actual theater of operations.”

As both servers run, dismounted Norwegian ground forces also will provide location information while Norwegian F-16s pull data from the servers in a variety of scenarios to see if their interfaces will  enable their systems to work with the servers, Miller said.  The servers were developed to be flexible and allow disparate service and national systems to be interoperable.

“The key aspect of the Combat ID Server concept is flexibility,” Miller said.  “All the nations operating together today have the means of tracking their own forces on the ground, but those technologies are different.  They weren’t all built to be interoperable.  Combat ID Server has demonstrated the flexibility to take that information from almost any source, keep it stored, keep it updated and provide it on demand.  People use the terms ‘born joint’ or ‘born interoperable,’ but the reality is that’s not the case and it may not ever be the case across the board.  You’ve got to have the ability to do things like this and make what you have today useful.”

During the next several months, Bold Quest activities will consist of multiple events to include preliminary testing.   This  activity will lead to Bold Quest 11, an operational demonstration that  puts technologies being tested into the hands of warfighters for a larger scale scenario.  Another test is scheduled for Germany in September.  Miller said the purpose of these smaller events is to mitigate risk and ensure the nations who participate in Bold Quest 11 arrive ready to go.

“All of this is aimed at getting participants as prepared as possible so when they arrive at the major venue, we wring as much value out of every data collection moment as we can,” he said.  “Everybody comes ready to operate, not ready to learn how to operate.”

Miller said the 14 nations that participate in Bold Quest do so because it allows them to test systems early in the development cycles and in a coalition environment.

“There are a lot of nations and servers that think this activity is worthwhile, because they all come into this Bold Quest process with their own forces, their own technologies and their own money to do it,” Miller said.  “Why is that?  The early assessment of proposed solutions is key to designing things the way warfighters want them and intend to use them and avoiding expensive development on things they don’t intend to use.  Do it early before things get expensive and do it in a coalition environment.

“We’ve all heard the phrase ‘Train as we fight,’” he continued.  “We take that into another realm and say ‘Test as we fight.’  If you know we’re going to be operating in coalitions, you know that combat identification is key to being able to operate with a whole host of other nations, and you know there are technologies out there that can allow you to do that, then you want to go early to a coalition environment and see what works.”