NATO

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STAVANGER, Norway – Major General Piotr Malinowski, Commander Joint Warfare Centre (JWC), participated in the Alliance Warfare Development Conference (AWDC) in Norfolk, Virginia, United States, from December 7 to 9, 2021.

The conference was presided over by General Philippe Lavigne, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT).

The 2021 AWDC, which replaced the former Chiefs of Transformation Conference, is Allied Command Transformation’s (ACT) annual meeting for NATO’s highest echelon involved in the ongoing development and future implementation of NATO’s Warfare Development Agenda (WDA), which is derived from the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept (NWCC).

Reflectively, the theme of the 2021 AWDC was, “The Alliance Warfare Development Agenda – from Concept to Reality”.

Overall, the conference was a crucial opportunity to further the NWCC, in line with the NATO 2030 initiative, ensuring that the Alliance “remains ready today to face tomorrow’s challenges.”

Referring to the JWC’s role in NWCC, Major General Malinowski said: “My team and I are continuously adapting and innovating at the speed of relevance to make NATO better by enhancing our forces’ readiness and responsiveness through exercises and warfare development activities.”

“In addition to delivering NATO’s most complex command post exercises, we also strive to take innovative steps towards more agile training methods. The wargame design capability is a great example of this effort, which was initiated against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic with great success. Our nascent capability is a result of excellent teamwork and I am very pleased that it was one of the highlights of this topmost level NATO conference,” the Commander added.


"In addition to delivering NATO’s most complex command post exercises, we also strive to take innovative steps towards more agile training methods.
The wargame design capability is a great example of this effort."

Major General Piotr Malinowski
Commander Joint Warfare Centre

 

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Major General Piotr Malinowski (middle) at Alliance Warfare Development Conference, December 7. Photo by ACT PAO


During the 2021 AWDC, staff members from the JWC’s Wargaming Branch delivered one of the four syndicates to provide key insights on how the Centre aims to accelerate Alliance learning through wargame design and supports operationalization of new concepts, such as the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA).

The JWC’s Wargaming Branch Head, Major Melissa Sawyer, explained that the Centre’s wargame design capability has already had a powerful impact across NATO and will have an even bigger impact once Full Operational Capability (FOC) is declared in early 2022, offering the Alliance a new concept development and training tool to alleviate increasing strategic and operational-level exercise complexity.

Sawyer underlined that during the process to get to FOC, the JWC collaborated with other NATO and national wargaming centres to share best practices and ensure its wargame design capability is fit-for-future.

“The AWDC is a great opportunity to further grow the NATO Wargaming Community of Practice and show how JWC is designing wargames on an array of challenging topics such as Joint Force Command contribution to national resilience,” said Sawyer.

“At the AWDC, we demonstrated two JWC-designed resilience-themed wargames, one educational and one analytical, to show the flexibility of our design capability.”

As one of NATO’s two strategic commands, ACT is both a symbol and instrument of the transatlantic security link between Europe and North America.

Subordinate to ACT, the JWC drives the delivery of collective training and warfare development at the operational- and strategic levels of warfare and builds the bridge between Operations and Transformation, underpinning NATO readiness and future capability development.
 

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