Day 1 of the 2010 Joint Warfighting Conference came to an end for me with a discussion between Navy Rear Adm. Dan Davenport, Joint Concept and Experimentation Directorate director, and French Rear Adm. Christian Canova, ACT Capabilities Engineering assistant chief of staff, on “Joint and Multinational Experimentation.”

Davenport talked about USJFCOM’s concept development and experimentation, explaining how answers to complex problems are reached.

“We work together with the warfighters — the experts — to come up with the right kinds of solutions. And then we include those operators — the experts — within the experimentation to make sure that the solutions we come up with are valid and meet the needs of warfighters. Then we work to transition those solutions, to turn them into real change for the warfighter, to institutionalize them so that they are endering changes for the warfighter.”

Canova, who earlier in the day talked about “Hybrid Threats and Irregular Warfare,” spoke about concept development not being a new idea and how a huge partnership and not just a single nation working to achieve results was a large improvement.

Both men also discussed the Multinational Experiment (MNE), a campaign originiated in 2001 between USJFCOM and ACT that involves partnership between 18 countries and NATO. MNE 6 is a two-year multinational and interagency effort to improve coalition capabilities to counter irregular adversaries and to prevent non-compliant actors from becoming adversaries through application of the comprehensive approach.

The theme of MNE 7 has been decided upon, according to Davenport, who said it would be “access to global commons.”

Jake Boyer has one more entry for today and then we’ll be back tomorrow with more coverage.