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Federated Mission Network Preparing for Sweden
FEDERATED MISSION NETWORK
PREPARING FOR SWEDEN
With Sweden having completed accession talks to become a full member of NATO, the NCI Agency’s
Jose Antonio Diaz and Scott Mitchell reveal the effort under way to enable Sweden’s military networks to become fully compatible with the Alliance’s Federated Mission Networking capability, which delivers communication network interoperability. David Hayhurst reports
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Since joining the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Programme in 1994, Sweden has been one of NATO’s most active partners. In terms of international operations, it was prominently involved in the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, as well as making major contributions to missions in Kosovo and Iraq. Sweden also regularly participates in NATO exercises, and this year hosted numerous activities during the BALTOPS 22 maritime exercise, which is NATO’s premier maritime training sequence in the Baltic Sea.
Now, with all 30 NATO Member States having expressed their initial agreement at the Madrid Summit this June – and with many among them having also offered security assurances – Sweden and Finland are well on their way to becoming full members of the NATO Alliance.
PARTNERSHIP INTEROPERABILITY INITIATIVE
With capability enhancement, operational effectiveness and interoperability being paramount NATO objectives, Sweden’s military has benefited greatly from its membership (together with Finland) of the Partnership Interoperability Initiative (PII), which was launched at the Wales Summit in 2014. In fact, Sweden is one of only six Enhanced Opportunity Partners under the scheme. Its mutually beneficial contributions to multiple programmes and exercises – from the PII to involvement in partner forces training, strategic airlift exercises and enhanced ties to other Nordic states – will all be key assets enabling Sweden’s military networks to achieve full compatibility with the Alliance’s Federated Mission Networking capability. “There is a high level of synchronization between Sweden’s goals within the FMN community and its integration within the NATO Alliance,” says Scott Mitchell, FMN Change Implementation Coordination (CIC) Working Group (WG) Coordinator at the NCI Agency. “I think the FMN community offers Sweden an opportunity for further
interoperability enhancements before it gains full NATO membership.”
“Sweden is very active and working extremely hard to integrate its command and control systems inside the FMN baseline,” says FMN CIC Change Coordinator, José Antonio Diaz. The country’s involvement from the beginning of the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF’s) mission in Afghanistan – whose operational requirements were the key driver in the creation of the FMN concept – was a critical factor in furthering Stockholm’s understanding of the need both to enhance and to hasten their adoption of NATO standards. “Nowadays, those are increasingly built in. That should both enhance its FMN compliance as well as its NATO compliance as it becomes a full member,” says Mitchell.
In 2016, the Swedish government stated that it recognized that future FMN spiral specifications designed to introduce incremental improvements will include additional requirements for evolving its military’s operational command support system to continue to be FMN compatible. And, in accordance with the Spiral Specification Roadmap and with other stated FMN spiral-related goals, “we are looking to add increments into Spiral 6 and 7 – and possibly 8 – which will allow us to reach the goal of data-centric security,” confirms Mitchell.
Sweden’s status as a leading contributing member of the Coalition Interoperability Assurance and Validation (CIAV) process began with its involvement from the start of the Afghanistan Mission Network (AMN) single information-sharing domain in 2010. As the CIAV process has developed and matured as an essential element in addressing interoperability concerns within the wider FMN framework – due in no small part to the lessons learned from AMN activities – Sweden has continued to be a major contributing member of the CIAV working group and wider community. As a result, “currently, there are no issues with them being members” regarding Sweden’s NATO compatibility “at least within the FMN framework,” says Mitchell. Within a wider context, “Sweden’s enthusiastic participation in NATO programmes and military operations has made them a close strategic partner,” he adds.
Both Mitchell and Diaz point to Sweden’s prominent involvement in two strategic airlift initiatives – the Strategic Airlift International Solution (SALIS) and the Strategic Airlift Capability (SAC) programmes – as only the first among many recent examples of Stockholm’s cooperative enthusiasm. And by their integration into such programmes, “Sweden contributes to the fundamentals of the FMN framework, because the operational processes – or technical standards, or forces – entered into exercises or missions, contribute to the knowledge base that will allow for improvements to gain overall ‘Day Zero’ interoperability,” Mitchell concludes.
Swedish and US forces practice defending Gotland during BALTOPS 22 (PHOTO: NATO)
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INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
Military innovations in space
Bringing flexibility and resilience to military space capability
John Reeves
Managing Director, Viasat UK
What are some obstacles (technical or otherwise) that you see preventing wider use of commercial space capabilities for the military?
There are a range of factors that inhibit the use of commercial capabilities by the military. This is true for space, as well as other technology and services areas where commercial offerings might be available to governments. A fundamental obstacle is that not all commercial technologies and capabilities are created with the unique needs of government and military users in mind. So, when evaluating commercial capabilities for government use, the main issues are often the security concerns and interoperability challenges with legacy systems and networks.
For the military space sector, that challenge of creating interoperability across allied space assets is a key issue that’s being looked at by several programmes in the United States. The question of how distributed military and commercial space constellations can interoperate and talk with each other is critical to leveraging the array of future communications capabilities. At Viasat, we take a dual-use approach to technology development, which means we’re thinking ahead about how certain technologies and solutions are designed so that they could be used to serve multiple applications and customers. That’s why we have a strong history of bringing capabilities that were developed for commercial use over to government, and vice-versa.
Finally, outside of the technologies themselves, there are still cultural obstacles to fully embracing commercial space technologies and services. Government has historically been the leader in driving innovation and new capability in space, but that dynamic has shifted as the commercial space sector has grown and matured. So, for some leaders inside government, commercial capabilities are still a bit unknown and unproven. We do see those feelings are shifting though, especially as governments understand what commercial can offer. It’s exciting to think about what the future holds.
What are some keys to developing new or emerging space capabilities that will bring more value to military and coalition operations?
To start, it’s helpful to think about the space capability needs of governments in the context of how they might go about either developing or acquiring a specific technology or capability. As I mentioned, governments have typically been the leading drivers of capabilities in space, particularly in places such as the US where the space programme spurred so much innovation. So, during that time all the technology and capability developed was “owned” by government, but we’ve reached a point today where that isn’t always necessary.
Developing and owning sovereign space capability is undoubtedly important, but there are cases where acquiring technology can be faster and more cost-effective by 1) collaborating with allied nation partners to develop or acquire the needed capability; or, 2) by directly accessing the technology or services that exist from the commercial sector. This “own, collaborate and access” framework is outlined in the UK Defence Space Strategy from the Ministry of Defence, but it’s a concept that applies broadly.
Beyond this though, the collaboration between the government and commercial sectors is also a factor. Greater collaboration and alignment of government needs and commercial technology roadmaps will enable commercial space providers to understand the real challenges and problems that exist for defence users, and, therefore, be in a position to better align commercial development priorities to develop solutions that address those issues. This is what I refer to as the “area of opportunity” for the future, where the ability of government to “collaborate to access” is what will ultimately create more effective technologies to
support specific military operational requirements.
Government also has an opportunity to get more from services models going forward. For example, satellite communications (SATCOM) as a fully managed service is something we’re seeing increasing interest in among defence customers. Viasat has been providing a fully managed SATCOM service to a military customer and there was immediate value from lower sustainment costs and increased operational readiness as the always-on service can be turned off as needed, as well as scaled up and down extremely quickly.
What are some space innovations Viasat is developing that would be particularly useful for NATO and broader military SATCOM applications?
The upcoming ViaSat-3 constellation is designed to bring forward capabilities that NATO and others would find incredibly valuable in meeting multiple operational use cases. First, it is designed to deliver substantial capacity with three terabit-class high-throughput satellites. The constellation is expected to boost our total capacity by approximately 600%. With this substantial increase in capacity, military users would have access to on-demand capabilities to meet not only day-to-day activities but also surge operations.
Additionally, ViaSat-3 should bring more flexibility to how capacity is used to meet demand. It will offer the ability to move bandwidth between beams to satisfy changes in demand, meaning that capacity could be quickly shifted to meet increased force deployments in a specific country or region. The ViaSat-3 satellites also have some unique features that are expected to benefit mobile platforms on the battlefield by offering more reliable and consistent comms-on-the-move (COTM). The constellation should also support militaries operating in contested and hostile environments with anti-jamming and LPI/LPD capabilities.
Looking at future needs, Viasat is also focused on investing in advanced and agile network capabilities to support hybrid architectures. This is something we’re actively working to enable through our current agile network technologies, as well as through further research like the ongoing study we’re conducting with the European Space Agency on multilayered SATCOM networks. We see facilitating a multi-orbit, multinetwork capability as what will ultimately be most effective in serving the future information and data transport needs of the multidomain and coalition force missions.
