Norway hosts NATO exercise Unified Vision 2012

By Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch

American Forces Press Service announced the start of a joint NATO and US Air Force and Army technical trial, Unified Vision 2012, on 18 June 2012. Over a 10 day period, 700 participants from the United States and 12 other countries from the NATO intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance community will be set various challenges to resolve. They will be operating at Oerland Air Station in Brekstad, Norway, and at other locations in Europe and the United States.

Dr Richard Wittstruck, chairman of NATO’s Joint Capability Group on Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JCGISR) and the senior US Army official at the trial said that the participants would use their full range of human, electronic and intelligence capabilities to track and analyse threat information. He said an objective of the trial is to identify gaps in information-gathering and dissemination and to help in charting the way ahead for future technological advancements or new tactics, techniques and procedures. NATO allies overcame many difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan and learnt to improve capabilities and share information.

To make the trial realistic, the Norwegians will turn on surface-to-air missile systems so participants can attempt to geo-locate them. A Norwegian navy frigate will collaborate with ground and air assets to identify and engage targets. Norway also has authorized participants to turn on active GPS jammers for part of the exercise -- something impossible to do in most parts of the world, where it would interfere with commercial and industrial operations. The players will have to identify where these jammers are and whether they “need to be neutralized”, while conducting their own intelligence efforts using backup systems not reliant on GPS signals.
 
Dennis Lynn, from the Air Force and senior US national representative at the trial, said that: “The core of Unified Vision 12 is our ability to share sensor data among the allies”. He added that this has been a challenge historically because of the many different systems involved, the technical challenges of processing and organising such a vast amount of data, and the tendency to protect information. A big help to data collection and sharing of information will be NATO’s new Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with advanced ground-surveillance radars when it becomes operable in a couple of years, Lynn added.
 
Wittstruck said the aggressive 12-month planning timeline NATO adopted for Unified Vision shows its commitment to moving this process forward and Lynn said that he was optimistic about the outcome, stating that the effort is vital to future NATO operations as “ISR is absolutely critical to fighting the modern war”. 
 
The Ottawa Citizen reported that Canada would not be participating in Unified Vision 2012, but did not explain why. There is no information about the technical trial on the Norwegian Ministry of Defence website or the NATO website.