Nine NATO nations have launched a five-year project to boost the alliance’s ability to tackle new challenges by rapidly sharing imagery and other information from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, alliance officials said.
Under the agreement, technology that is currently being successfully used in Afghanistan will be further developed and applied in a wider context, the alliance said in a statement.
This will make it easier and faster for Nations to share imagery from high-priced assets, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, surveillance aircraft and other such assets, as and when necessary. “These assets–and their deployment–are very expensive,” said Lt. Col. Arle Brustad of Norway, chairman of the nine-Nation project team. “By rapidly sharing imagery, we can avoid having multiple assets deployed in the same location, cover a significantly larger area, or cover a specific area for a longer period. In effect, what we get is more intelligence for our Euro.”
The project was launched in Rome in February 2011 and formally briefed to the NATO armaments and C3 community Feb. 21.
The level of effort will amount to over 100 million Euro and involve industry from the nine participating nations: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
The project will also look to sharing and leveraging military assets –such as UAV imagery–in support of civilian authorities in crisis management and other roles such as border monitoring.
“We realize that many of the later developments potentially widen the applicability of the capabilities,” Brustad said: “For example, military UAVs are already being used in Afghanistan to monitor progress in farming, providing key data to civilian authorities.“
The Multi-intelligence All-source Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC 2) succeeds the original MAJIIC, which resulted in the Alliance being able to rapidly share full motion video in Afghanistan.
“MAJIIC delivered very real benefits in Afghanistan,” said Joe Ross, technical manager for the project at the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A). “For instance a commander can instantly access imagery from another Nation’s UAVs, meaning that he does not have to deploy his own multi-million asset, or can deploy it in other area, allowing for the most efficient use of these expensive assets.”
Similarly, because the data is labeled, stored and shared across the coalition, national intelligence analysts have far more useful material at their disposal. As an example this has significant benefits in the fight against IEDs, or drug and arms smuggling through so-called “pattern of life” analysis.
Specific benefits to NATO from the MAJIIC 2 project will include: increased resource efficiency, improved mission effectiveness,
lower investment cost, and more operationally effective utilization of technology, and risk reduction to future NATO network enabled capability acquisition–through a common, operationally relevant development and test-bedding concept.
The nations have contracted technical management to the NC3A and bring to the project fielded and prototype systems along with subject matter expertise from military, government, and industry staffs.
The business model of MAJIIC 2 is to develop agreed standards and operational concepts as guiding requirements for national and NATO acquisitions.
Technical work has begun. Major exercises are schedule for 2012.