SitaWare Headquarters a big success in Danish Army exercise
The Royal Danish Defence College (Forsvarsakademiet) and the Royal Danish Army Academy (Hærens Officersskole) put their SitaWare Headquarters 4.9 software installations through their paces in a major staff exercise held in Oksbøl, Denmark, in April 2010.
28 April 2010
Multi-level staff exercise
This important Danish Army staff exercise meant intensive use of SitaWare Headquarters 4.9 C2 (command and control) software in one Corps HQ, one Division HQ and 3 Brigade HQs.
To initiate events, input was received from 80 Joint Conflict and Tactical Simulation (JCATS) training simulation systems.
All technical support during the exercise was provided by the Danish Army’s own administrators, providing a clear demonstration of how easy it is to deploy Systematic SitaWare C2 installations in the field.
It was one of the first times that the Danish Army experienced success with carrying out a staff exercise on that many different levels at once. One of the officers leading the exercise explained that this was partly a result of the kinds of streamlined decision-making procedures that stem from the use of computerised C2 systems such as SitaWare. One clear indication of the way such modern C2 systems impact an exercise of this type was that there were hardly any traditional paper maps on the walls!
Worked well
The students and participants had done most of the planning as homework prior to the actual exercise, and then installed their plans on the operational kit in the containers at the exercise site.
It was impressive to see how the students made use of the SitaWare Headquarters planning tools in a particularly flexible manner. This enabled them to carry out their operational analyses of possible courses of action and “wargaming” with possible enemy responses, before deciding on which course of action to promote as the final plan. Other tools, such as Jchat, were also intensively used on the participants’ SitaWare workstations.
During the three-day exercise, the SitaWare Headquarters software ran with an exceptional degree of stability on 60 clients spread across 5 servers. Both users and system administrators reported that they were generally very pleased with the SitaWare Headquarters system, and how well it worked.
“Students from the Army General Staff Course/Danish Defence Academy and Advance Officers Course/The Danish Army Academy undertook the entire planning and implementation of the exercise using SitaWare software tools. Without a full roll-out of the SitaWare-based C2 system, it would have been very difficult for the students to keep an updated situation picture in this highly intensive two-level staff exercise. SitaWare performed to our full satisfaction throughout the pre-exercise planning phase as well as during the actual three-day exercise, with no need for support from external contractors.”
An officer from the exercise staff at the Royal Danish Defence College.