African Mission Network Provides Secure Coalition Communication During African Lion 2019

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Chief Warrant Officer 3 Quintin Lawerence, stands outside the CJTF-HQ April 2, during African Lion 2019 in Agadir, Morocco.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Quintin Lawerence, stands outside the CJTF-HQ April 2, during African Lion 2019 in Agadir, Morocco.

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Photo by: Capt. Jonathon Daniell 

AGADIR, Morocco -- The Africa Mission Network is providing a secure way to collaborate information with African partner nations during exercise African Lion 2019 in Agadir, Morocco.

AMNET is U.S. Africa Command’s episodic coalition network that has the ability to share classified information with U.S. partners for a specific operation, mission, or exercise. During the exercise, the eight participating nations were able to quickly and securely share information.

This seamless system allowed all participants of the exercise to strengthen their communication and effectiveness while working together.

“Previous to AMNET, our only means of sharing information with our partners was over unclassified networks or bilateral networks, so we created a network that we could bring up for a specific exercise that would allow us to bring in a coalition of countries,” said U.S. Marine Master Sgt Brian Dimock, the lead AMNET planner with U.S. Africa Command.

It is a user-friendly network that is efficient and allows translation of languages, communication between the partner countries and interoperability.

“Once you bring a network together and have a unified method to share information, it brings us together,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Quintin Lawrence, the AMNET system administrator with U.S. Army Africa. “Working with our partners has been an amazing experience. The experiences that they’ve shown us and the experiences that we’ve had coming together has made a huge impact on this exercise.”

This is the second year that AMNET is being used at African Lion.

“We implemented some lessons learned from last year to make it better this year,” said Dimock. “Some of those lessons learned include having the Africa Mission Network in Tunisia in addition to Morocco, and also not only having it available at U.S. sites, but also having it available at the national Moroccan Joint Operations Center in Rabat. Those are pretty big steps forward to making this a true coalition network.”

AMNET has been a valuable asset to African Lion 2019, which is an annual, combined-multilateral exercise designed to improve interoperability and mutual understanding of each nations’ tactics, techniques and procedures while demonstrating the strong bond between the nations’ militaries.