Common Tenacity Exercise 2022: On the road to NATO Joint Task Force HQ!

INTERVIEW of the JOC- Director: “If JTFHQ was compare to a human body, the Joint Operations Center (JOC) would be a part of its brain…”

The Battle Captain has just received a phone call from civilian authorities. The support of JTF is urgently requested to secure and evacuate numerous wounded civilians after a suicide bomber attack. He alerts personnel inside the JOC and begins dispatching the first tasks.  “The response to this kind of urgent incident is daily business within the JOC. We could be compared to a part of the brain of a human body,” explains Lieutenant Colonel M., the JOC-director. “We’re the organ that centralizes information on any incident occurring in the entire Joint Operation Area, then decides or proposes to the Joint Force Commander the appropriate measures to take. We have to prioritize incidents according to his guidelines and to the importance and urgency of the situation. The tools for linking up to the rest of the JTF HQ Staff are highly effective,” he adds.

The digital map permanently implemented, the instant messaging application and the event tracker system enable the dissemination of information and the sharing by all HQ of the same operational picture and situational awareness. This also encompasses rudimentary procedures, allowing the JOC to guarantee its resiliency and achieve mission objectives if digital systems fail. To conduct its missions, the JOC relies on a permanent core staff of joint liaison elements (land, air, maritime components) and branches experts such as Intelligence, Logistics, Civil-Military Actions, StratCom, Medical and Engineering, who are occasionally reinforced by on-call ad hoc-experts to respond to specific types of incidents. 

“Crawl, walk and run” is an apt final quote to represent this exercise, according to LTC M. “Last year’s internal exercise series allowed us to learn procedures. With Common Tenacity 2022, we were able to train on them, get to know one another and work as a Team. There’s still work ahead, but we are on the right track to achieve certification as Joint Task Force HQ role during Steadfast Jackal 23 at the end of next year”.

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