How can interoperability help training beyond national borders?
Interoperability and cooperation between nations is becoming more common among armed forces around the world. This cooperation empowers the members’ capabilities and effectiveness, a key for efficient cooperation is military training and multinational exercises.
Complex conflicts, often in urban environments, requires new strategies, materiel systems and new technologies. The growing number of multinational missions and alliances between national forces and different types of combat units are placing high demands on system integration, interoperability and command and control capabilities.
Since its start in 2008, Saab has been a part of the Interoperability User Community (IUC), an initiative to increase multinational exercises and interoperability requirements. Today, armed forces in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, United Kingdom, the United States, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Chile, Belgium, Estonia, Poland and New Zealand are a part of the initiative.
The IUC cooperation areas include joint efforts to make training systems interoperable and support the development of common standards and interfaces such as optical interfaces, agreed ammunition tables, ammunition penetration capability data and target vulnerability guidelines. The objective is to support training between member armies, improve simulation realism and establish e.g. agreed ammunition lethality and engagement effects. Today the work has expanded and also includes developing common manuals for international training guidelines.
Training needs are rapidly evolving in line with the shifting global security threat situation. Lessons learned shows that mission success in today’s multidimensional combat environment is all about being able to plan, co-ordinate and synchronize actions across the full spectrum of service, joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational operations.
Change creates new challenges for people, companies and society as a whole. One of the greatest challenge today is to manage an ever-changing threat situation and establish military and civil security procedures and doctrines suitable to address each treat. There is a growing demand for flexible, adaptable, scalable and cost effective solutions.
The international collaboration between armed forces is likely to play an even more important role in the future. When both joint-developed solutions as well as multinational forces are becoming more important, the needs of multinational exercises and training systems which supports that increases.
With extensive expertise and leading products in the field of live training and simulation, including in the virtual domain, Saab offers the most reliable and realistic training and simulation systems worldwide. Saab has developed and maintained enduring close relationships with many NATO countries and operates in accordance with prescribed NATO recommendations.
Saab’s training ethos is based on providing training flexibility and fidelity delivered by a forward leaning team of experts. The training teams’ mission remains constant – give the user an excellent, realistic training experience, deliver expedient unrivalled objective high fidelity data feedback to accelerate learning, maximize training value and support Commanders in creating confident soldiers and thereby optimizing combat effectiveness.