WASHINGTON — The Australian military will use this year’s Project Convergence to bolster its relationship with the U.S. as well as exchange information-sharing techniques and procedures that officials consider necessary to counter technologically savvy opponents.

Brig. Gen. Warren Gould, the director general of systems and integration with the land capability division of the Australian Army, said Oct. 12 the weekslong experiment will allow the two militaries to intimately interface. That means understanding “what we are doing with different technologies that we’re both bringing to the table to share, develop that trust and test policy that we have at the moment, test those delegates who have approvals to connect networks, and to normalize that behavior.”

“I have the fortune of being able to look to the future through Project Convergence,” Gould said at a Defense News event during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, “and then try and apply that into how we work tonight, how we fight tonight.”

Project Convergence kicks off in October and runs through November. This year’s edition will directly involve Australia and the U.K. — two close allies — as well as other international observers.

The experiment will feature Indo-Pacific and European scenarios, an acknowledgement of national security threats posed by China and Russia, respectively. Officials at AUSA this week described the tranches as maritime- and land-centric.

“When you look at Australia, our setting is the Pacific,” Gould said. “We naturally look to [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] as the headquarters that we seek to be interoperable with, to work with.”

Project Convergence is the Army’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, the Pentagon’s concept of rapid information sharing and tailored responses to aggression. The Air Force similarly has the Advanced Battle Management System; the Navy has its Project Overmatch.

Key to JADC2 is the so-called mission partner environment, which allows data from a spectrum of militaries to be collected, secured, distributed and acted upon. Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of the U.S. Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team, said Wednesday the U.S. wants “technologies from Australia and our technologies from the U.S. [to] share information in that mission partner environment.”

The Army in June said it verified the forces participating in Project Convergence this fall can exchange data and link over long distances, a major milestone.

The preliminary testing included dozens of technologies, according to the service, and stretched from Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Fort Bliss in Texas to the Australia and the U.K.

Colin Demarest was a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covered military networks, cyber and IT. Colin had previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

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