Allied Command Transformation (ACT) hosted the seventh annual Industry Day in Prague October 5-7. The annual strategic-level conference aims to develop and foster the command’s relationship with industry.

ACT Industry Day 2010 focused on the relations between ACT, the European Union (EU) and industry. This year, the event included active participation from the European Defence Agency (EDA) and Adam Sowa, Deputy Chief Executive of the EDA.

During his remarks, French Air Force General Stephane Abrial, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, thanked Dr. Alexander Vondra, Minister of Defence for the Czech Republic, for his country’s hospitality in hosting the event, before going on to speak on the importance of engaging industry to better NATO’s capability development.

“One of the numerous ACT responsibilities is to conceive and to develop capability requirements for NATO and to be sure they match the needs of future operations,” Abrial said. “Industry has a unique awareness and experience and we want to ensure that we use this proficiency to the best of our ability. We need industry for its expertise, its knowledge, its vision and to listen to its proposals.

Last year, we launched what is called the FFCI initiative,” he continued. “It provided ACT with the authority and ability to jointly engage Industry and Academia in collaborative work at the non-procurement phase. It was challenging and today it seems to be a success. More than a dozen companies have engaged sustained exchanges with ACT on a large variety of topics.”

Abrial also provided some insight into the 2010 theme, “Better Synergy for Better Capabilities,” citing the overlap of shared defense assets between the 21 Nations who belong to both NATO and the EU.

“My main interlocutor in EU is the European Defence Agency, since our topics are, I wouldn’t say identical, nevertheless very close in capability development,” Abrial explained. “That is why I decided to focus on this theme during this Industry Day 2010 edition. We have already begun developing informal relationship with the EDA. My aim is to make as much progress as possible within the actual constraint framework. The two main fields in which we work together relate to practical capabilities projects and defence planning processes.”

Throughout the two-day conference, NATO and Industry participants engaged in discussions, debates and working groups on topics including Distributed Training and Exercises using Modelling and Simulation, Medical Information and Coordination Systems, which looks at issues such as the creation of electronic records, and NATO Network Enabled Capability (NNEC). The objective of this two-stage working session was to initiate debate between ACT, EDA and industry on future collaborations regarding NATO and EU network-enabled capabilities. The second part offered ACT and the EDA an opportunity to hear from industry on their potential contributions to the implementation phase of NNEC.

Other areas of collaboration were the Distributed Training and Exercises (DTE) Programme Update, the Multinational Federation Experiment and potential follow on programme, NATO CAX Toolkit component Development, Afghan Mission Network Training and Staging Enclave, Exploiting the Distributed NATO Battle Lab programme, and Cyber Defence.

“I would insist on the opportunity that represents this conference as an ideal forum for interaction and for ACT to present new challenges and new initiatives especially in this year of big changes within NATO,” Abrial concluded. “The new strategic concept is well underway and will be agreed at the Lisbon summit in November and it will give the way ahead for the next ten years to come.”