NATO’s largest live military exercise in decade is underway to test readiness and interoperability.
Trident Juncture 2015 is a series of training exercises to test the NATO Response Force (NRF), and the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. More than 36,000 troops — including air, land and marine forces from over 40 nations and organizations — will participate at locations across Italy, Spain and Portugal for training opportunities in conventional and hybrid warfare, as well as cyberattacks and humanitarian scenarios.
The Science and Technology Organization-Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) and Comtech Systems Inc. are two of the many contributors to NATO’s Trident Juncture 2015 live training exercises, held Oct. 21 through Nov. 6.
According to news releases, CMRE scientists deployed the NATO research vessel Alliance to act as a boarding platform, vessel of interest and operations center for mine countermeasure experiments, while Comtech provided a high data rate troposcatter link to enable highly resilient, low-latency communications between the Land Component Command Headquarters at San Gregorio, and the Joint Task Force Headquarters at Zaragoza Air Force Base in Spain. These efforts are in support of over 36,000 troops — including air, land and marine forces from over 40 nations and organizations — joined together in locations across Italy, Spain and Portugal for training and learning opportunities.
The MUSCLE underwater vehicle — CMRE’s mine-hunting mature prototype equipped with a high-resolution, high-frequency synthetic aperture sonar — will be tested during search, classification and mapping missions. The MUSCLE is optimized for operations in coastal waters, where it can survey scientifically challenging seabed and test automatic target recognition while following advanced autonomy algorithms.
Comtech’s troposcatter system, provided in partnership with the NATO Communications and Information Agency, was selected to test the potential of a non-satellite beyond line-of-sight link over a path blocked by an intermediate mountain. The terminals addressed a scenario requiring high-capacity, cost-effective communications without relays or high towers due to difficult terrain, and the low-delay 12 Mb/s per second link also delivered resilience in the noisy radio environment of an air force base, say participating scientists.
