As part of Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise (CWIX)’s 25th anniversary, we are looking back through the years to see how it has evolved. Today’s spotlight on Austria looks at how a small Partnership for Peace nation has leveraged CWIX to pack a big punch.
Colonel Hermann Jud is the CWIX24 National Lead for Austria, ICT & Cyber Planning Division of the Austrian Ministry of Defence. With more than two decades of experience with NATO interoperability efforts on behalf of the Austrian Ministry of Defence and a member of the CWIX community since 2005 – when it was previously known as “JWID” and then “CWID” – Jud is an interoperability veteran.
Observing the growth of CWIX in recent years, Jud says, “As CWIX has gotten bigger, it has also gotten more effective.” In 2009, Austria stepped into a formal observer role at CWIX after approval by the North Atlantic Council, and the following year, Austria expanded its testing program across multiple networks. The Allied Command Transformation-led exercise, he says, has enabled nations to “get away from stove-piping” in different communities of interest and increased cross-community information exchange. “And the Wiki (the CWIX information sharing platform) has improved a lot!”
The Austrian experience at CWIX also highlights how a nation is engaging in NATO’s Partnership for Peace, a programme of practical, bilateral cooperation between individual Euro-Atlantic partner countries and NATO. It allows partners to build up an individual relationship with NATO, choosing their own priorities for cooperation. Since 2014, under the Partnership Interoperability Initiative, Austria has participated in the Interoperability Platform, which brings Allies together with selected partners that are active contributors to NATO’s operations.
For Austria, interoperability has always been at the core. Through testing at CWIX, Austria established a national Point of Presence, and de-risked connectivity and interoperability. “Our biggest national step forward was the implementation of the Combined Federated Battle Labs Network Point of Presence in the national battle lab,” Jud says. “This came after more than two years in the accreditation process within the Combined Federated Battle Labs Network Community.” Austria’s battle lab joined the Combined Federated Battle Labs Network in 2021.
While Austria’s level of personnel and resources at CWIX is limited, its participation in CWIX optimizes opportunities for collaboration and maximizes resources. “A small and, by the way, neutral Partnership for Peace Nation cannot afford to invent everything on its own,” says Jud. “Cooperation and burden sharing – exemplified by NATO’s Federated Mission Networking community and at CWIX – are the only feasible ways to get troops, networks, and IT services mission-ready in a proper time frame on an affordable budget.”
Looking to the future, CWIX will remain integral to Austria’s Command & Control pipelines, remaining “a very important element in the national capability development and deployment phase of IT Services for the Austrian Mission Network Services stack.”
While CWIX yields technical benefits and interoperability advancements, Jud says its greatest asset is the people. “CWIX creates human interoperability and trust. When technology and processes come into the game, you only can test with partners who you can understand and who you trust. People work together and help each other; engineers talk to operators and vice versa. Both dive into a new world and together, they improve mission readiness.”
