Article - JOINTEX 13: A great first step towards interoperability

July 18, 2013

By: Michelle Ferguson

From 6 May to 8 June, approximately 7,500 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members from across the country participated in the fifth and final stage of JOINTEX 13, a multi-stage joint training exercise meant to change the way the CAF train and fight.

The first in a series of nation-wide joint training and readiness events, JOINTEX 13 was created to further the CAF’s ability to conduct complex full-spectrum operations within a multi-national, coalition environment.

The exercise was designed to develop joint capabilities between the Army, Navy, Air Force and Special Operations, as well as prepare the 1^st Canadian Division HQ for its future role in leading a Canadian Combined Joint-Inter Agency Task Force (CJIATF) HQ.

“I think the impressive part is how we did it,” said Colonel Ken Chadder, the exercise director for JOINTEX. “What we were trying to do was exercise within a synthetic environment, in a way that we need to do in the future: distributed across the country, integrating live, virtual and constructive activities.”

Stage 5 of JOINTEX combined a Computer Assisted Exercise (CAX), a Command Post Exercise, and three live force-generator exercises – the Royal Canadian Navy’s TRIDENT FURY conducted off the Pacific Coast, in the vicinity of Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, BC; the Canadian Army’s MAPLE RESOLVE conducted in Wainwright, Alberta; and the Royal Canadian Air Force’s MAPLE FLAG conducted at 4 Wing Cold Lake.

The combination of both simulated and live activities was accomplished using a synthetic environment – a digitally created “world” – which linked together all the different events taking place across the country. Something the CAF have never done before.

While integrating the live force generator exercises added an unprecedented level of realism to the CAX, it did prove to be a bit challenging. As did many aspects of training a joint, interoperable CAF.

“One of the challenges that we had in building JOINTEX was that it was built after the Army, Navy and Air Force had already planned out how they were going to do their own exercises, so we had to sort of weave a JOINTEX covering scenario and environment over top of three existing exercises,” explained Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Ford, head of lessons learned at the Canadian Forces Warfare Centre (CFWC).

Now that JOINTEX has wrapped up, LCol Ford and his team are hard at work creating a critical topics list for the Commander Canadian Joint Operations Command, Lieutenant-General Stuart Beare. This list is developed with the direction of Commander CJOC and will be used to drive changes in the way the CAF operate. LGen Beare’s vision is to implement these lessons learned in future exercises in order to prepare for JOINTEX 15, which will take place in two years.

“The idea behind JOINTEX 13 was to create a capability, to institutionalize that capability and that infrastructure, and then build on it – instead of always going back to square one and re-inventing the wheel every time,” said Col Chadder.

So far, 1,800 observations have been collected on Stage 5 alone.

One of the main areas for improvement is the lack of commonality between systems. At the moment, the CAF do not have a joint command control system that can display a common operating picture. While the Army, Navy and Air Force all have their own systems, the technologies do not necessarily talk to each other, making it difficult to drive joint decision-making and planning.

Another area that could be worked on is joint doctrine – a key observation, as jointness was one of the primary objectives of the exercise.

“In all the areas whether it’s targeting, Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR), or training, one of the common things that is missing is joint doctrine,” said LCol Ford. “People don’t have anything to fall back on. They don’t have a joint doctrine manual that they can read. So a lot of the issues that we’ve developed are going to drive a change in that area.”

Some capabilities, like targeting and ISR, however have already seen immense progress since Stage 4 of JOINTEX.

While the integration of ISR information still needs some work in order to provide a complete operational picture, the CAF made strides to improve this capability by creating a tactical datalink architecture that enabled HQs from across the country to access live video streams captured by each of the force generators.

“This common database had been in the works for some time, but really came together during JOINTEX,” said LCol David McKeever, who was responsible for overseeing the construction of the training system. “The beauty of JOINTEX from my perspective, from CFWC’s perspective, was that it was the right mechanism to force us together at a Canadian joint level – for the Army, Navy, and Air Force to work together and really understand each other and actually collaborate with systems,”.

Overall the exercise was deemed a successful first step towards interoperability within the CAF.

“JOINTEX 13 started off as an ambitious project,” said LGen Beare. “The CAF really capitalized on this opportunity to grow as a joint, interoperable Force. And it is my intention to continue to build upon this foundation to create a stronger, more integrated Force that is ready to deploy at any second, whether here at home or halfway across the world.”