Cyviz embraced the challenge of creating a fully operational, mobile military control room inside a storage container in just 24 hours. Paul Milligan finds out how they did it.
Strange things can happen at trade fairs, just ask John van Laerhoven and Steijn Engelen from collaboration systems provider Cyviz. It was during the NEDS military fair in Rotterdam last year that Cyviz was first approached by the Joint IV Commando (JIVC), the main IT department of the Dutch Ministry of Defence, to see if it wanted to take part in a 24-hour challenge to build the control room of the future.
“They didn’t say too much more than that. We got invited a month later, when they told us, ‘This event is going to be different, there will be no rules’. Which is very unusual to hear working in the defence industry,” says van Laerhoven, Cyviz’s regional director. Intrigued by the initial approach, van Laerhoven was soon back on the phone. “When you said no rules, do you really mean no rules? They said yes. So then we asked, if we dump a 14-tonne container, which is ballistically safe, and we want to put a control room inside it within 24 hours, which is fully operational, which can be deployed because it fits on a standard military truck, does that fit no rules?” They said looking at where the challenge was going to take place it should work, so that’s what we did.”
The whole challenge was actually to build a military headquarters that the command of an armed forces (or NATO partner) could use within 24 hours in a crisis situation.
Working on this challenge meant bringing in partners such as construction company SPIE Nederland and safety company Dujardin Remmers, who supplied Cyviz with a ballistically safe container. In case you are wondering why it’s called that; it’s a container that can withstand bullets from machine guns and shotguns. Realism was a factor
in this challenge and was fully embraced by the participants as part of the whole experience. “At times it felt absolutely real, there were three different shifts for sleeping in the 24-hour period, so we really had the feeling it was as real as it could get,” says van Laerhoven. Cyviz and its partners only met (virtually) once, one week before the event, and because the details of the challenge were limited ahead of time it meant that Cyviz had to constantly think on its feet on the day of the challenge.
“We only took the container and our command and control kit, which has military multi-class certification, so we could connect classified and ‘dirty’ (i.e. non-classified) internet sources together. We started at 10:00, by 12:00 we had connected all the military intel we had available to us.” Within a short time Cyviz was able to connect to the JIVC network, military networks, and with the crisis management network from the Netherlands Fire Brigade and Police Department.
The team who took part in the 24-hour control room challenge left to right: John van Laerhoven and Steven Gibson, Cyviz; Annelies Mc Curdy-van Veen, Capgemini; Richard Jongejan, SPIE Nederland; and Steijn Engelen, Cyviz
It didn’t stop there says Engelen, Cyviz account executive, Europe. “The Dutch military police inserted a device to track their personnel in the field, this took us five minutes and that data was up on the screen too. We were like a spider in the web connecting to data sources the commander needed to get an overall operational picture.”
There was certainly no shortage of issues to overcome in this challenge, but Cyviz was able to meet them, and in many cases go way beyond what was expected of it, even installing a robotic dog from Boston Dynamics to walk the perimeter to check for enemy intruders. One tough challenge was to install an antenna without it being seen (and potentially shot down) by combatants.
“The military always says that everything that is alive within 200 metres of you should be wearing a uniform, because that’s the way it is in the field,” says Engelen. “The antenna was the main problem. When we started sending signals, the antenna was detected, we put a fibre connection in, we even tried a light connection where the antenna is miles away from where your container is, because when you get spotted they will bomb your antenna, even when you are sitting somewhere completely different.”
The short timescale of the challenge added to the realism says van Laerhoven. “If there's a real incident and someone attacks, you don't have 24 hours to prepare, so we needed something to connect all the data, and that’s what we did in the container. We really made it a complete experience so that if you put a general or commander in this room, they would recognise it straight away and be operational as quickly as possible.”
To really test the control room’s capabilities, they decided to simulate what would happen if an F35 fighter jet was shot down in international waters using a major critical event management platform. The challenge also utilised VR, in a system which created a battlefield by pulling satellite images and photographs from Google Street View. Van Laerhoven explains the benefit of using VR in this way: “By changing the (2D) satellite images you instantly have a 3D battlefield you can move around in. When you
put on the headset you can find out information such as should we send more troops? How is the environment? Are there spots you can use to hide in? This software, provided by Capgemini, has been fully implemented into our environment.”
Cyviz also installed a drone detection system, which was fitted to the roof of the container so they could see any enemy drones flying close. “We also had some drones
in the sky so you could see what would happen if any drones did try and infiltrate our air space. That took the longest out of anything we had to connect because we had to get the permits to get those drones flying on a military base, which was tricky and time consuming,” says Engelen.
Space is clearly limited inside a storage container compared to a normal control room, but Cyviz was still able to install two desks, with two operator stations, and one 105-in screen on which all the sources were fed into. “We could dynamically switch between the sources via our control system, we could switch to see the drone radar, or to see the attack system, and we could bring up to five sources at once on the big screen in our demo set.” The original plan was to use projection “because it's a little bit more dynamic,” adds Engelen, “but there just wasn’t enough time.”
The speed at which this could be up and running hints at future uses in the field, especially because this system is portable. Time is incredibly critical in these scenarios, says van Laerhoven, “that’s the reason why we wanted to put it into a container because war could break out across the world and we need to be flexible to make sure we can transport it. The container we used was fitted for a standard military truck, so you can dump the container on any truck and drive it to a specific spot where it needs to be. In the container we had a flight case of half a rack, which had all the equipment in it. That's the main learning point we wanted to give back to [the defence industry]. Whatever you connect, wherever you need the data, it will work, but you have to have something ready, somewhere in a warehouse where you can connect it to. Because building that in 24 hours will be a challenge if you don't have it. But if you have just the right amount of those systems stocked somewhere, you can just drive them anywhere and be operational in a safe and warm container instead of in a tent."