Maritime ink spot: FOST expertise spreads across NATO navies

摘要

Between late May and early July 2019, the UK Royal Navy's (RN's) amphibious assault ship HMS Albion led the inaugural operational maritime deployment of the newly formed Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) multinational task group. The JEF is not a NATO construct, and the deployment, called 'Baltic Protector', included both NATO members (the United Kingdom as framework lead, plus Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Norway) and non-NATO members (Finland and Sweden). Nonetheless, the participants were laced together by broadly similar command, control, and communications (C3) constructs, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) largely developed within the context of NATO training and operations.