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Bold Quest Event Builds Interoperable Fires For Tomorrow
by Jim Garamone, DOD News
November 26, 2020
Despite coronavirus, the Joint Staff's Bold Quest 2020 event at
Camp Atterbury, Indiana, allowed the services and partners to
demonstrate and assess U.S. and coalition interoperability.
The event involved roughly 600 people ... 400 in Indiana and roughly
200 attending virtually, said John Finch, the deputy demonstration
branch chief with the Joint Staff's J-6 directorate. Finch works
with the Joint Fires Integration Division in the Deputy Directorate
for C4Cyber Integration.
"We're all about coalition
interoperability in the kind of joint and combined fires and
sensor-to-shooter interoperability," Finch said in a telephone
interview.
Bold Quest is an annual event that allows
participants to assess systems and capabilities in a realistic
operational environment.
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Soldiers with the Indiana Army National Guard conduct a field artillery fire mission during Exercise Bold Quest 20.2 at Camp Atterbury, Ind., Oct. 31, 2020. Led by the Joint Staff, Bold Quest is a multinational exercise that demonstrates the joint capability to link sensors to shooters across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace.
(U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Joel Pfiester)
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At Camp Atterbury, Bold Quest assessed the way the U.S. services
could work together and integrate different systems, as well as
adding the capabilities of partner and allied nations, Finch said.
All of the capabilities in the demonstration work well in the
laboratory, but Bold Quest tests to see if they will make the
transition to the field. It is one thing for a system to work in a
temperature-controlled lab, it is quite another to see if it works
in a rainstorm or hurricane.
"Underneath that general
heading, there are specific objectives that are determined by the
priorities and the requirements that the services or the partner
nations have at any given time," he said. "Some of what we did in
this event … was integration of some of those areas to look at
interoperability and movement of data and information across that
sensor-to-shooter chain."
This means the integration of
close-air support, tube artillery, rocket artillery, naval gunfire
and more. It means combining intelligence from an observer with
binoculars to unmanned aerial vehicles to manned platforms to
satellites and more.
All these objectives were integrated to
look at a broader picture of the interoperability across different
processes related to joint fires, Finch said.
The services
and international partners went to Indiana to assess their systems
and the tactics, techniques and procedures that go with them. Bold
Quest gave them the data needed to make decisions about what changes
or improvements need to be made, Finch said.
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Air Force Capt. Will Boddy, a joint terminal attack controller, controls aircraft during Exercise Bold Quest 20.2 at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Butlerville,
Ind., Oct. 28, 2020. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt.
Joel Pfiester)
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The 400 participants at Camp Atterbury were scattered in
different locations and buildings. The 2nd Battalion 150th Field
Artillery of the Indiana National Guard provided the guns and fired
more than 100 rounds over two days in support of Bold Quest.
COVID-19 severely limited international travel, but many
international partners were able to take advantage of the
distributed aspects of the event, Finch said.
There were six
partner nations: Canada, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway
and Sweden.
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