European Defence Agency validates a new SW tool for Crisis Response Planning

As illustrated in a recent news report, a new planning tool is going to be used in the support of European Crisis Response planning. The tool, named Intra-theatre Mobility Capability (ITMC), is a decision-support tool at Political-Military level (Ministries of Defence, European External Action Service, for instance) to evaluate deployment options and produce timelines, cost and other management information that could help inform to formulate a course of action for either military operation or civilian mission.

The ITMC tool, that was developed through EDA’s operational budget, went recently through a validation session to assess its capacity and suitability in the support of EU decision-making process. The session was attended by the representatives from EU Military Staff (EUMS) and Member States, and chaired by the EDA. Different deployment options and scenarios were run throughout the validation session (with fictitious areas of deployment) so as to thoroughly exploit the capacity of the tool and analyse the results.

Compatibility with the NATO's LOGFAS tool was tested by exporting data from and importing it into the ITMC tool. The interaction between ITMC and LOGFAS tool was successfully completed. ITMC is complementary to NATO’s LOGFAS tool as both are playing roles at different stage of the planning process. The ITMC comes to advise on which resources (financial, transportation assets, infrastructure) are needed to deploy the troops to a certain area, whereas LOGFAS software is designated to create detail deployment plan and to deconflict the deployment with Troop Contributing Nations.

References: European Defence Agency (1)