15:45 GMT, March 1, 2010 NC3A Brussels and The Hague | On 26 February, Major General Per Lodin from the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV - Försvarets materielverk) visited NC3A in The Hague. Hosted by the General Manager, the Director of Production and the Chief Technical Officer, it follows up the DGM’s visit to Stockholm of last year. The purpose of the visit is to inform MGEN Lodin about the position of NC3A within NATO and to discuss potential further strengthening the cooperation already taking place.

In 2007 NC3A signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with Sweden on cooperation in high priority areas of C4I. Through this agreement, the Focal Point in NC3A, Mr. Brian Christiansen, Chief CAT2/8, has negotiated with his Swedish counterpart to specify areas of mutual cooperation. “Sweden must be interoperable in Afghanistan. NC3A can assist in ensuring that” he said. This has resulted in a number of technical support activities where NC3A has supported Sweden, such as Combined Federated Battle Laboratories Network (CFBLNet) hosting, ICC validation, and workshops on various technical issues.

NC3A and Sweden have also collaborated on simulation federation and Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance experimentation. In preparation are activities that include cooperation in the area of C4I Architectures, Distributed Networked BattleLabs (DNBL), and communications architectures. Conversely, NC3A has first-hand experienced the capabilities of the Swedish approach to Network Enabled Capabilities and will surely learn from those experiences.

This visit is intended to further consolidate the excellent cooperation between FMV and NC3A to enable Sweden to be interoperable with NATO capabilities. The opportunities for the NATO C3 Agency to become a Design partner for Sweden in order to ensure that systems will be interoperable will be discussed. Partnering during the design phase will save money in the future, as Swedish forces may have to operate with other (NATO) Nations.