ACCS Makes Tracks: Is NATO's Largest Procurement Programme Meeting Expectations?

摘要

NATO's Air Command and Control System (ACCS) is the alliance's biggest single procurement and perhaps its least well known. "The NATO Air Command and Control System is intended to combine and automate at the tactical level the planning and tasking and execution of all air operations," notes a NATO document outlining the ACCS' scope. Dubbed "the most comprehensive and complex of NATO's programmes" once completed, the ACCS architecture will help safeguard ten million square kilometres of NATO's European airspace. It will connect 20 different installations responsible for controlling NATO combat aircraft, and 40 different types of ground-based air surveillance radar will be networked into the architecture, the NATO document continues. Connectivity between airbases; surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations; control and reporting centres; fighters; radars; and supporting infrastructure, will be assured not only within a nation's Integrated Air Defence System (IADS), but between NATO European nations equipped with ACCS. This will be achieved through 160 datalinks and interfaces and the 14 million lines of code needed by the ACCS software. For all intents and purposes, ACCS will be the C2 backbone underpinning the NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defense System (NATINAMDS), protecting the skies of the alliance's European membership.