September 02, 2002

A Team of Australians, both DSTO and RAN are to participate in the US Navy Fleet Battle Experiment - Juliet in Newport, Rhode Island (RI).

The team is manning a Virtual Collins Submarine and are conducting ASW operations with other real and virtual platforms spread from the United Kingdom through to Southern California.

More than 4,000 US Navy and civilian personnel and a handful of coalition personnel from Australia, Canada and the UK are participating in FBE-J, a joint warfighting experiment.

CMDR Vern Dutschke is co-ordinating Australia's involvement.

"Juliet is the tenth in a series of FBE's and is being conducted under the overarching objectives of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC-02), the congressionally-mandated joint event designed to simulate a realistic 2007 battlefield to assess the interoperability of new methods to plan, organise and fight."

"FBEs are developed and run by the Navy Warfare Development Command using fleet resources to conduct the experiment and evaluate the initiatives in an operational environment."

The Coalition Experiment is focused on improving command and control for joint and combined operations. The effort is focused on the anti-submarine warfare (ASW).

According to CMDR Dutschke, "Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom naval forces comprise the multi-national component working with USN forces, with the US functioning in the lead nation role".

The live and virtual forces Order of Battle participating in this initiative include:

CMDR Dutschke said, "these real and virtual forces are working together to combat an "enemy" force as part of the tactical scenario".

"The advanced simulation systems are such that the virtual Collins is able to conduct coordinated ASW operations with a live DDG (USS Benfold) against a live submarine.

CMDR Dutschke explained the benefits for the RAN and ADF as a whole.

"The objective is to establish a shared information environment for effective command and control in a multi-national, network-centric operational framework."

There are wide ranging benefits to DSTO and the RAN and these include:
Provision of experience in running an exercise where real and virtual platforms are interoperating in the same geographic area; and giving DSTO and the RAN greater insight into the future requirements of a Collins Class submarine to engage in coalition network centric warfare operations.

The experiment also provides for experimentation on the type of information and the rate of information exchange required to generate and maintain a common tactical picture between coalition platforms and exposes DSTO leading edge research.
.