The CWIX exercise (Coalition Warrior Interoperability eXploration, eXperimentation, eXamination eXercise), is the main annual interoperability event organized by the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Command Transformation (HQ SACT) on behalf of North Atlantic Council (NAC) and del NATO military committee (MC). For the occasion, the nations tested the current military command and control capabilities (both short-term and experimental and future) with particular attention in the field Federated Mission Networking (FMN).
Il NATO Center of Excellence for Modeling and Simulation (NATO M&S COE) in continuity with past editions, took part in this event by carrying out interoperability tests in the "Future Core Services and Cyber", experimenting two capabilities in the application areas of Modeling and Simulation as a Service (MSaaS ) and Cyber M&S. Furthermore, the NATO M&S CoE within the Cyber focus area has proposed, developed and conducted a "Cyber Joint Vignette" in collaboration with the NCIA (NATO Communications and Information Agency), as a theoretical test for the support of Cyber M&S in future exercises. in the FMN multidomain operating environment.
NATO's M&S CoE team, supported by industrial partners, has worked closely with more than 10 nations, pioneering the interoperability of MSaaS and Cyber M&S services in six domains. The two capabilities that NATO M&S CoE experienced during CWIX '21 are on the one hand the MSaaS Open Cloud Environment ApplicatioN (OCEAN) in the FMN / Cyber Synthetic Environment configurations (in collaboration with Leonardo) and on the other hand the Virtual Security Operation Center (VSOC) in Cyber and Operational Command configurations (in collaboration with Leonardo and Cy4GATE).
VSOC capability supports training and operations by leveraging NCIA's cross-domain solution. The novelty was the dialogue between unclassified and classified networks by stimulating real Cyber and Command and Control systems by means of simulated Cyber effects services. At this point, an "information layer" was provided on the cybernetic state of the maneuvering units (Recognized Cyber Picture), contributing to operational Cyber Situational Awareness and automating the compilation and sharing of operational reports.
OCEAN is the solution developed by Leonardo in collaboration with NATO M&S COE that implements the NATO approach of Modeling and Simulation as a Service (MSaaS), offering a single access point to the simulation services available through a web portal where users they can search, compose and execute M&S applications in order to use them in a simple and intuitive way. OCEAN extends traditional virtual environments for experimentation, testing and training with a dynamic (cloud-based) environment capable of instantiating virtual machines, containers and virtual networks, in isolated or merged competitive sessions. The collaboration with NCIA regarding the testing of Ocean's capabilities in the FMN "software defined node" field aroused considerable interest, demonstrating the ability to automatically install and configure the systems that make up an FMN node starting from a set of software instructions (called "playbook ") Defined by NCIA.
The unique and innovative nature of the MSaaS OCEAN capability was appreciated by the Innovation Working Group and proposed to the Leadership of Participating Nations as one of the most innovative command and control support capabilities of CWIX 2021, demonstrated during CWIX VIP's day held on 22 June.
