Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 1: Concepts and Solutions for Communications and Information Systems
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The participating coalition nations are able to bring accurate examples of their
national mission CIS and C2 systems to the community thereby creating an accurate
representation of the AMN for testing. From there the participants initiate interoperability
testing with the tempo and priorities dictated by ISAF Joint Command,
based on the Coalition Mission Thread and Information Exchange Requirement, all
applications to be deployed on the operational network were assessed to identify capabilities
and limitations, with associated operational impacts. The warfighter benefit
achieved through the CTE2/CIAV initiative was that it allowed all applications to be
tested on pre-deployment test network prior to operational deployment. All the interoperability
issues and patches could be applied before they were introduced into
the operational environment thus ensuring minimal impact to the operator. In addition
and equally important to applications testing, the test environment is able to
simulate the actual operational environment which consists of many nodes with
multiple application configurations. At a fairly fast rate the CTE2/CIAV team fostered
the incremental addition of appropriate service and coalition labs as enclave nodes
to simulate the operational environment. The CTE2 community started initially
with NATO, the UK and USA. Shortly afterwards Canada, Italy, France, Norway,
Germany and the Netherlands joined. By adding sites that have national extensions
to the AMN, the CTE2 provides the Warfighter with an operationally realistic test
and evaluation environment to mitigate risk on the AMN. Between March 2010
and July 2012, during 9 periods of 90 days validation cycles, 28 systems were tested
of which 26 are currently fielded in ISAF.