What Australia wants out of this year’s Project Convergence experiment

WASHINGTON — The Australian military will use this year’s Project Convergence to bolster its relationship with the U.S. as well as exchange information-sharing techniques and procedures that officials consider necessary to counter technologically savvy opponents.

Brig. Gen. Warren Gould, the director general of systems and integration with the land capability division of the Australian Army, said Oct. 12 the weekslong experiment will allow the two militaries to intimately interface. That means understanding “what we are doing with different technologies that we’re both bringing to the table to share, develop that trust and test policy that we have at the moment, test those delegates who have approvals to connect networks, and to normalize that behavior.”

“I have the fortune of being able to look to the future through Project Convergence,” Gould said at a Defense News event during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, “and then try and apply that into how we work tonight, how we fight tonight.”

Project Convergence kicks off in October and runs through November . This year’s edition will directly involve Australia and the U.K. — two close allies — as well as other international observers.

The experiment will feature Indo-Pacific and European scenarios, an acknowledgement of national security threats posed by China and Russia, respectively. Officials at AUSA this week described the tranches as maritime- and land-centric.

“When you look at Australia, our setting is the Pacific ,” Gould said. “We naturally look to [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] as the headquarters that we seek to be interoperable with, to work with.”

Project Convergence is the Army’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, the Pentagon’s concept of rapid information sharing and tailored responses to aggression. The Air Force similarly has the Advanced Battle Management System; the Navy has its Project Overmatch.

Key to JADC2 is the so-called mission partner environment, which allows data from a spectrum of militaries to be collected, secured, distributed and acted upon. Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of the U.S. Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team , said Wednesday the U.S. wants “technologies from Australia and our technologies from the U.S. [to] share information in that mission partner environment.”

The Army in June said it verified the forces participating in Project Convergence this fall can exchange data and link over long distances, a major milestone .

The preliminary testing included dozens of technologies, according to the service, and stretched from Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Fort Bliss in Texas to the Australia and the U.K.

Colin Demarest was a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covered military networks, cyber and IT. Colin had previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

华盛顿——澳大利亚军方将利用今年的“融合计划”来加强与美国的关系，并交流信息共享技术和程序，官员们认为这些技术和程序对于对抗技术娴熟的对手是必要的。

澳大利亚陆军陆地能力部门系统与集成总监沃伦·古尔德准将10月12日表示，为期数周的试验将使两国军队能够进行密切的互动。这意味着要了解“我们各自带来的不同技术，以便共享，建立信任，检验我们目前的政策，测试那些有权连接网络的代表，并使这种行为规范化。”

“我很幸运能够通过‘融合计划’展望未来，”古尔德在美国陆军协会年会期间的一次《防务新闻》活动上说，“然后尝试将其应用到我们今晚的工作方式和战斗方式中。”

“融合项目”将于10月启动，持续至11月。今年的项目将直接涉及澳大利亚和英国这两个紧密的盟友，以及其他国际观察员。

此次试验将模拟印太地区和欧洲两种情景，分别体现了对中国和俄罗斯构成的国家安全威胁的承认。美国陆军协会官员本周将试验分为以海洋和陆地为中心两个阶段。

古尔德说：“澳大利亚所处的环境是太平洋。我们自然而然地将美国印太司令部视为我们希望与之实现互操作、开展合作的总部。”

“融合计划”（Project Convergence）是陆军为联合全域指挥与控制（JADC2）所做的贡献，JADC2是五角大楼提出的快速信息共享和针对性应对侵略的概念。空军也有类似的“先进作战管理系统”（Advanced Battle Management System）；海军则有“超强计划”（Project Overmatch）。

JADC2的关键在于所谓的任务伙伴环境，它允许收集、保护、分发和利用来自不同军事力量的数据。美国陆军网络跨职能团队主任杰斯·雷少将周三表示，美国希望“澳大利亚的技术与美国的自身技术在该任务伙伴环境中共享信息”。

美国陆军在六月份表示，已证实参与今年秋季“融合计划”的部队能够远距离交换数据和连接，这是一个重要的里程碑。

据该机构称，初步测试涵盖了数十种技术，测试范围从马里兰州的阿伯丁试验场和德克萨斯州的布利斯堡一直延伸到澳大利亚和英国。

科林·德马雷斯特曾是C4ISRNET的记者，负责报道军事网络、网络安全和信息技术方面的新闻。此前，他曾为南卡罗来纳州的一家日报报道美国能源部及其下属的国家核安全管理局，主要关注冷战后的清理工作和核武器研发。科林还是一位屡获殊荣的摄影师。