The international exercise “Common Roof 19” with participants from Austria, Germany and Switzerland is taking place in the Schwarzenberg barracks until Friday. The exercise has been taking place simultaneously in all three countries since the end of September – this year under Austrian leadership.
Over 100 soldiers from Command Support Battalion 2 in St. Johann im Pongau and from the Armed Forces Command in the Schwarzenberg barracks are practicing with soldiers from Germany and Switzerland to set up and operate a multinational military command and control network and to defend against cyber threats.
The focus of “Common Roof 19” is on joint operational management, which is ensured by standardized IT service management processes, ICT security processes and the ICT services used (such as e-mail, chat, telephony, military command information systems, etc.). The exercise is managed from the Schwarzenberg barracks by the specialist department of the Armed Forces Command.
Robust, digital networks are the backbone of military operations today. The increasing challenge is that these highly regulated and highly secure communication networks of the respective armed forces and other operational organizations are largely shielded from the outside due to their sensitivity, thus severely restricting cooperation between the organizations.
Data exchange from network to network is hardly possible and is usually limited to so-called “swivel chair interfaces”, which act like bottlenecks in the common information space. In order to avoid this in the future, a concept for the creation of a secure connection of national military networks – “Federated Mission Networking” – was created at multinational level, which is to be used in the exercise between the three participating nations.
The exercise serves to further develop and practically test the concept for operating joint operational networks in a multinational network. The operational management procedures and the measures to be taken in the event of disruptions and threats from cyberspace are trained, validated and evaluated and subsequently implemented. The exercise also forms the framework for the first use of the prototype of a new, deployable data center of the Austrian Armed Forces with the aim of expanding it as part of the Common European Foreign and Security Policy. “It’s very complex, you can’t see the enemy. The previous missions were simpler,” says exercise leader Brigadier Arnold Staudacher about the new way of conducting operations. Cyber threats can be diverse: “fake news” is just as much a part of it as hacker attacks or the paralysis of public leadership networks. The aim is to establish an independent command network for the military and operational organizations in the partner nations and to take cyber threats into account when planning operations.
