SitaWare operates across VIKING 18 exercise

SitaWare Headquarters was employed at multiple international sites in support of the crisis management and peacekeeping exercise

The world’s largest civil-military staff exercise concluded in late April, with SitaWare Headquarters playing a key role.

The VIKING 18 exercise trained civilians, military and police for joint operations in a peacekeeping or crisis response mission area. The Swedish Armed Forces and the Folke Bernadotte Academy led the exercise with the United States as a strategic partner, the event included around 2,500 participants from 50 countries and 35 organisations, distributed across nine sites in Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Ireland, Serbia, and Sweden, where the exercise was headquartered.

The aim of the 10-day event was to train and educate multinational participants in planning and conducting a UN-mandated Chapter VII Peace Support Operation, with a focus on cooperation and coordination in an unstable environment.

SitaWare provided participants with comprehensive awareness of the operational picture across the exercise, with only minimal training required to enable personnel to benefit from the system’s capabilities. “There was one person in every staff who was a well-trained SitaWare operator, we trained them for three days and they were the staff trainers,” explained Captain Peter Lindskog of the Swedish Armed Forces, “They then trained the staff for 30 minutes and after that the staff could start receiving the operational picture,” Capt Lindskog added.

The exercise scenario drew on a variety of real-world examples and unfolded across the fictional country of ‘Bogaland’. It included a wide range of actors, with challenging issues to deal with, such as humanitarian crises, terrorism, cyber attacks, and organised crime.

“We had 35 factions in the scenario and we could put in whatever frictions we’d like to. The main purpose was to have military personnel communicating with civilian organisations and trying to figure out what information they should share,” Capt Lindskog explained.

“We used SitaWare to distribute the common operating picture to the different military elements, and we pushed a lot of information to them,” Capt Lindskog said.

The system’s ease of use was a key aspect, in order to ensure that the participants worked with the same operating picture and did not revert to analog tools, “SitaWare was really easy to understand and use, it is intuitive and the participants were enthusiastic. There was a lot of discussion about the best practice for the use of SitaWare,” noted Capt Lindskog.

20 SitaWare HQ servers – used by up to 1,000 operators - supported the exercise, with the system maintaining and distributing the common operational picture from brigade to joint headquarters levels. SitaWare also integrated with multiple training and simulation systems in order to support the decision making process.

About SitaWare

SitaWare is a software product suite providing robust situational awareness of blue and red force data at all levels of command. Each dedicated product in the suite is specifically designed for the challenges facing commanders in headquarters, mounted and dismounted environments, to provide unrivalled tactical data communication.

SitaWare was selected as the architecture framework for the US Army’s Command Post Computing Environment, allowing for immediate third party development of integrated Command Post, Mounted and Dismounted tactical computing capabilities.