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Ottobrunn Maritime! Multi-national forum hosted by IABG

Rare guests have gathered in Ottobrunn in the past two weeks: The multi-national Maritime Theatre Missile Defence Forum (MTMD Forum) met on occasion of its routine spring meeting at IABG.

In 1999, the MTMD forum was launched by Germany, the Netherlands and the United States with the goal of exploring joint approaches for developing a maritime defence system against long-distance and intercontinental missiles. In 2004, the forum was joined by Australia, Canada, Spain, Great Britain and Italy, thus enabling the expansion of its tasks to the entire air defence spectrum, from classic air defence to strategic anti-missile defence. France became a member of the forum in 2009.

Focus of the first week were the meetings of the different work groups, which dealt with projects for the creation of more robust architectures of mission systems of future air defence ships, improved interoperability of today's ships as well as common interface standards. Their work was presented to the national project managers (NPOC) in the second week, discussed and moved to the decision stage respectively.

The MTMD forum projects cover

  • the design of architectures, their modelling and qualification in laboratory tests
  • the development of operational and technical solutions to compensate recognized interoperability problems and their qualification in maritime exercises
  • the formulation of common goals to create multi-national interface standards within the sectors of radar and decision support systems.

Largest project of the MTMD forum in the coming years will be an at-sea demonstration in 2015, where the future state-of-the-art air defence ships of all marines involved are to come together for a joint exercise and test. The four-week exercise is to end with extensive firing tests of most diverse defence missiles. This will be the first time that ships will exercise together in such concentration and in a convoy that size. For 2016, an identical demonstration of the improved capabilities is planned in the Pacific region.

Ottobrunn as venue enabled a total of 70 delegates to explore the Alpine foreland or to enjoy a guided tour through the BMW World. The IABG Technology Centre with its outstanding technical infrastructure offered participants a stimulating working environment matching military security issues.

IABG has maintained close connections with the forum for many years. IABG employees are members in the work groups for architectures and concept & simulation and thus support the modelling of complex command system architectures and their validation by simulation. In this context, the “SIMBURG” is used: a simulation of the air defence elements of a German class F 124 frigate, one of the most modern ships of its kind world-wide.