The EAG’s motto is “improving capability through interoperability”. With this in mind, the EAG completed the two-week long VOLCANEX CIS 22 Exercise with partner nations at Borgo Piave, home of the Italian 4th Brigade de Telecomunicazione on 12 – 23 September 2022.
During the training exercise, Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK conducted trials under the EAG’s CIS, Cyber and Tactical Data Link team’s leadership and direction.
The exercise was designed “by technicians, for technicians, to make operations possible” and featured interoperability trials and tests between the nations’ different communication assets, ranging from the mature High Frequency (HF) radio and more modern Multi-Band Frequency Radios and Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), to more sophisticated Tactical Data Link (TDL) and Federated Mission Network (FMN) systems.
The EAG’s focus when planning the exercise was to develop a building block process which started with assessing compliance of systems, followed by their functionality. A total of more than 170 events were developed for that purpose. Once this had been achieved, it allowed technicians to innovate mission essential proficiencies and practices when working with partners in a collaborative environment.
VOLCANEX CIS 22 provided a unique opportunity to rehearse, refine, develop and adapt tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to be employed across EAG nations in an operational arena. A key outcome was to identify areas where travel footprint can be reduced while increasing interoperability and maintaining capability. Lessons learnt will be discussed at the post-exercise conference with the expectation that next year’s VOLCANEX CIS, hopefully hosted in the UK, will include more challenging scenarios.
