From 4 to 7 November, the NCI Agency was host to the Initial Planning Conference for the Coalition Warrior Interoperability eXploration, eXperimentation and eXamination eXercise (CWIX) 2015. The purpose of the conference in The Hague was to identify test partners for the main event in June 2015, and to start identifying the environment and tests that will be conducted next year. Around 20 focus areas were identified, and attendees presented their ideas and plans for CWIX 2015.
NCI Agency Site Principal Chuck Shawcross welcomed the meeting on Tuesday 4 November. The plenary sessions had to take place at a nearby hotel, since the agency was unable to seat the nearly 200 delegates in the Main Conference room. After the initial sessions on Tuesday, the conference continued in the meeting room area in the NCI Agency building in The Hague. Eighteen nations were represented, among them four partner nations. NATO had representatives from seven agencies/commands and two Centres of Excellence.
As always, CWIX will conduct testing in a wide range of areas. Federated Mission Networking (FMN) continues to attract much attention; Tactical Data Links, Friendly Force Tracking and GeoMetOC are also areas that interest many nations. More experimental activities, like Data Labelling are also popular. Nations also want to test their systems against NATO systems, and the agency is preparing to support this as well. The traditional military areas (land, air, maritime and joint) are also important, with the agency participating with systems in all four areas, and leading the air focus area together with Turkey.