USJFCOMLive

Among the 10 other nations participating in Bold Quest 09, France’s contingent stands out.  The French military has contributed aircraft, systems, testers, and ground and air personnel to the coalition’s combat identification effort. Two men are responsible for running the French portion of the event – French Air Force Majors Michel Gente and Fabrice Laurens.  I spoke to both men as they were in the midst of transitioning leadership from Gente to Laurens.

Gente, who ran the French team for the first half of the event, said that his military’s participation was focused on two objectives: testing and experimentation with the reverse-identification friend-or-foe system and working with digitally aided close-air support.  Both systems are loaded aboard a French C-160 transport aircraft.

Laurens told me that it was very important for France to be involved in the assessment, because the interoperability of joint close-air support systems was a key element in preventing fratricide in a coalition warfighting environment.  He said his nation’s military was concerned with all things centered around CID.

We are participating in an operation like this because we are really concerned by all the things centering around combat identification to avoid fratricide.  We are really concerned about that.  We do the maximum that we can to get the technology to help us make missions go well.

The goal of our presence is to work with interoperability because there are a lot of systems like digital CAS which are interservice, but they cannot dialog together.  We have big issues with all the formats and all the protocols.  We have to deal with that here, together in an exercise like Bold Quest, which is a really big exercise.

Gente said that since he is more accustomed to working exclusively with aircraft, BQ has been a valuable chance for him to work in an unfamiliar environment.

I am more familiar with usual exercises involving fighters and ground forces, but Bold Quest is quite different because it’s experimentation.  It’s very valuable to me to be here and to learn something different as an analyst here.  It’s very different from what I know.

Laurens said that the coalition environment offered by Bold Quest is ideal because the allies need to know where they are going – both individually and collectively – with CAS and CID.

We want to know the way all the allies are going in terms of combat identification, because there are a lot of technologies and it’s difficult to see which one will have a future and which one will not.