Systematic staff support multi-national command and control exercise

Personnel from Systematic offices in the UK, Denmark, and the US recently supported the US Army-led Warfighter Exercise (WFX) 25-4, demonstrating the value of international collaboration in data-centric military operations.

Mathias Rabouli from Systematic Headquarters in Denmark, Rob Tomlinson, Charles Streather, David Lewis, and Simon Thomas from Systematic Defence UK and Jeff Fisher from Systematic U.S., Inc. provided technical expertise for SitaWare software during WFX, held at Fort Cavazos in Texas from May 26 to June 4.

WFX 25-4 was led by the US 3rd Armored Corps and 4th Infantry Division, alongside multiple coalition partners including the UK’s 3rd Division, Germany’s 10 Panzer Division, and the French 1st Division. The exercise conducted simulated Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) against a peer/near peer opposing force (OPFOR).

Multi-domain interoperability 

“SitaWare products were used as the primary Battle Management Application (BMA) for the UK Army, tracking, managing and disseminating information across multiple and widely dispersed headquarters,” said David Lewis, Senior Systems Engineer for Systematic Defence UK.

All the coalition partners used SitaWare products as their Command-and-Control tool, providing a multi-domain unified Common Operating Picture (COP) and Common Intelligence Picture (CIP). UK and German forces used SitaWare Headquarters, while the US units employed the Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE) which uses SitaWare software as its base because of the open architecture, rich application programming interfaces (APIs) and multiple interoperability standards. SitaWare solutions also provided each coalition partner with all the Friendly and Enemy simulation data via NATO Friendly Force Information (NFFI), NVG, or Link 16. All the data was then able to be shared using SitaWare Headquarters Communications (SHC) protocols.

Supporting Project ZODIAC

The exercise also provided an opportunity to deploy ZODIAC, the UK military’s Land Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) program of record that uses both SitaWare Headquarters and SitaWare Insight: the intelligence add-on with enhanced Data Fabric capabilities on top of those already provided by HQ.

SitaWare Insight’s capabilities were used to manage the flood of data from external systems that often overwhelmed HQ’s on WFX and other exercises. Not only did SitaWare Insight ensure tracks were plotted correctly avoiding duplicates, but it also saved all messages (~3000 per hour) to its internal Data Lake to enable later exploitation. Dashboards were also created so that decision-makers were better able to visualize the activity over time of the simulated OPFOR.

“You have finally made data usable” one intelligence officer said. “At last, I am not having to hunt around SharePoint to find what I need,” said another.

“We supported the exercise from an engineering perspective,” said Lewis. “We mainly assisting the ZODIAC project but also liaised with the UK Army and its Enhanced Command and Control Spearhead (EC2SpHd) project.”

“For the first time, a UK HQ has not needed analysts to swivel-chair data from an external system to their own. Nor have they had to monitor multiple JChat rooms and manually plot reports to the CIP. Insight’s flexibility meant that an innovative ChatBot developed by the EC2SpHd could be deployed onto ZODIAC part way through the exercise” said Simon Thomas, a Domian Advisor at Systematic with an extensive background in military intelligence.

WFXs are distributed, simulation supported, tactical command post exercises fought competitively against a live-thinking regional adversary in a complex environment to prepare units for future large-scale combat operations.

Learn more about SitaWare's Suite's multi-domain capabilities and interoperability here.