The US Department of Defense (DoD) has signed a bilateral statement of intent (SOI) with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Northern Ireland.
It was signed between US Joint Staff J6 director Lieutenant General Mary O’Brien and UK Strategic Command deputy commander Lieutenant General Tom Copinger-Symes.
The US DoD said that the new effort aims to strengthen the mutual understanding of common national initiatives between the two nations.
The agreement will further boost operations and capabilities, allowing the two countries to attain a military advantage. It will minimise the intent of potential adversaries that threaten the stability of the US and the UK.
It will allow both the nations to continue to work together for enhancing the command-and-control (C2) capabilities to support the armed forces.
This joint effort to achieve improved C2 capabilities will be supported by the US DoD’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative, and the British MoD’s Multi-Domain Integration Change Programme (MDI CP).
The objective of JADC2 is to provide war fighters with the ability to support and accelerate the decision-making process at multi-domain levels, in the different phases of war.
The British MPI programme combines the multi-domain efforts at all the necessary warfare levels.
The new agreement will act as a ‘coupling bridge’ to combine the two programmes using common capabilities, principles, data, and interface standards.
This joint ‘pathfinder capability’, also referred as Fully Networked Command, Control, and Communications, will increase the efficiency of both the countries.
In addition, the bilateral next-generation capability cooperation (NGCC) between the UK and the US streamlines steps to establish a combined approach for interoperability, and also supports the objective of establishing collaborative C2 between the two countries.
