Vice Admiral Guy Robinson, Allied Command Transformation Chief of Staff, recently visited the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in La Spezia, Italy. The Centre organizes and conducts scientific research and technology development, centred on the maritime domain, delivering science and technology solutions to address defence and security needs of the Alliance.
Vice Admiral Robinson visited both the research vessels that enable science and technology solutions to be explored and developed at sea. The largest of these vessels, the NATO Research Vessel Alliance, is an ice-capable global class vessel that is one of the world’s quietest vessels, allowing for precision acoustic studies to be conducted at sea. The ship enables scientists and engineers from the Centre and partner nations to conduct a wide range of experiments; equipped with modern scientific instruments and a sophisticated navigation system, it can launch and recovery scientific and engineering sensors, oceanographic instruments, autonomous vehicles and tethered devices. The smaller vessel, the Coastal Research Vessel Leonardo, is a flexible sea-going scientific platform suitable for operations in shallow waters, equipped for a variety of scientific and deck equipment to provide complementary capability to those of the larger vessel Alliance.
The visit also included the Centre’s Quantum Lab and Glider Lab, where scientists develop new technologies enabling access to unmanned systems that have the ability to sense, comprehend, predict, communicate, plan, make decisions and take appropriate actions to achieve mission goals. Solutions developed in these labs provide operators with new technologies across the spectrum of expeditionary kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities required to defeat traditional threats decisively and confront irregular challenges effectively.
Vice Admiral Robinson addressed the scientists working at the Centre, highlighting the fundamental role of experimentation and the close connection between Allied Command Transformation, where innovation and digital transformation initiates, and the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, where these innovative concepts see their realization.
