How are scenarios of NATO exercises developed? General John W. Doucette, Deputy Commander & Chief of Staff -- Joint Warfare Centre.
"Steadfast Jazz 13 is the most complex exercise we've delivered in our 10 years of existence. We have distributed training audiences throughout Europe and our exercise control were Excon (Exercise Control) located in Stavanger, Norway will be the largest ever. We'll have over 500 personnel that are diligently delivering, monitoring the script, ensuring that injects are accurate and continuing to keep the exercise on track for its entire period. Developing SKOLKAN took two years and it was a very involved process that involved NATO leadership, NATO force structure and command structure input and then at the Joint Warfare Centre we knitted all that together to provide something that NATO could use for the next five to ten years for many of their collective level training exercises. It's a very thoughtful and deliberate process to provide many facets of what we are looking to achieve in our training events. These exercises, based on the SKOLKAN scenario, provide a realistic look at what our NATO Alliance members and partners might face in a contingency, whether it be inside the European area or outside the European area. We can bring in very complex problems that deal with cyber space, that deal with some of our in- and out-of-area threats. We can also tailor it to a humanitarian mission requirement. The exercises that we produce give training audiences throughout NATO to include the US the opportunity to work together, to learn the procedures and to become more interoperable. The more realistic the setting and the scenario is, the more realistic their training is and the better they'll be when they go down range or they have to be in a contingency".
