The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Crisis Management and Disaster Response Center of Excellence (CMDR COE) located in Sofia, Bulgaria recently licensed MASA SWORD for training military and civilian users of the center in emergency preparedness, collaboration in operations and civil-military cooperation.
SWORD is a wargame with automated forces designed for training, planning, and decision support. It uses advanced artificial intelligence to enable realistic simulations of military and civil units reacting to a wide variety of scenarios. Their automated actions follow doctrine and procedures previously validated by subject matter experts. This unique capability allows for large-scale exercises to be conducted realistically while minimizing costs and animation effort.
The CMDR COE will use SWORD to train participants for emergency situations and for interoperable scenarios including both civil and military actors. The use of SWORD will also help them in contingency planning for crises and disasters.
MASA Group President and CEO, Juan-Pablo Torres, said: “As MASA continues to develop SWORD for its customers around the world, emergency planning has proved to be a vital functionality. We have been continually improving SWORD for many years so that our customers can use it for both training and planning purposes. MASA is honored that the NATO CMDR COE has chosen SWORD as its constructive simulation and we are proud to support NATO's crisis management and disaster response operations”.
Colonel Vassil Roussinov, Director of the Center of Excellence, said: “We were looking for a state of the art constructive simulation with an extensive use of artificial intelligence capable of dealing with complex interoperability issues both on the military and the civil sites. After extensive evaluation, we found that SWORD was the most effective tool for our teams to train and work with. What really set SWORD apart was that we felt that it was the tool that could not only cover our current but also our future requirements in a society that is increasingly demanding. In cooperation with MASA Group we can make a lot of improvements in the near future in the CMDR field and can propose to NATO a new environment where they can train and exercise crisis and disaster management issues”.
The Crisis Management and Disaster Response Center of Excellence (CMDR COE) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established on the 28th of August 2013 by its Sponsoring Nations of Poland and Greece, and Bulgaria as Framework Nation through the signing of the required Memoranda of Understanding (MOU): the Operational MOU between the participating Nations and the Functional MOU between the Participating Nations and NATO HQ SACT.
On 31st March 2015, following end of a silence procedure by NAC, the Center has earned status as the 21st NATO COE and has been activated as a NATO Military Body with a granted international status under Article 14 of the Paris Protocol, as recommended by HQ SACT.
The organization will provide support to NATO transformation and to the enhancement of NATO capabilities in the Crisis Management and Disaster Response domain.
The Center's aim is to pool expertise in order to improve interoperability, development and enhancement of NATO standards in building capacities for crisis management and disaster response; to provide assistance for the effective use of joint experience and capabilities of NATO, Nations, Partners and international organizations in the field of crisis management and disaster response; to provide education and training of military personnel, government officials and civilians, and organizational structures in the field of crisis management and disaster response.
