About Northern Strike
Northern Strike is a military readiness training operation sponsored by the United States National Guard Bureau. For the past 10 years, the exercise has been focused on building readiness and improving interoperability with global allied forces through scalable and tailored combat-ready training operations.
“Intelligence members from the Air National Guard utilized the Stryke Lightning provided by Haivision in support of Northern Strike Exercise (NS23). We were able to pull up multiple chat rooms and live feeds from MQ-9s on a single pane of glass. In doing so, Intel members were able to act as liaisons for the Air Force MQ-9 operating within the NS23. With the location of the Stryke Lightning being in a high traffic area in the building, Intel members were able to provide real time imagery to Army and Marine units interested in the MQ-9 providing ISR overwatch and satisfy all customers requesting ISR support.”
Technical Sergeant Matt
Michigan Air National Guard
The Challenge
The challenges encountered in Exercise Northern Strike illustrate the common obstacles faced by military missions in real-world scenarios. Effective missions require establishing a common operational picture and real-time delivery of situational awareness. Throughout Northern Strike, mission commanders needed immediate access to battlefield data, video communications, and intelligence information from all platforms and across all commands.
The Solution
To support the exercise, Haivision worked with the National Guard on the distribution of MQ-9 Reaper full motion video (FMV) to ground units using the Kraken ISR transcoder and Haivision Media Platform. This capability captured live intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) video for real-time review, recording, and analysis. Haivision also deployed its ruggedized expeditionary video wall system Stryke Lightning in a Joint Operation Center (JOC) at Camp Grayling, Michigan. This portable video wall provided mission commanders situational awareness of battlefield data, communication, and intelligence.
The Result
Haivision’s support for Northern Strike included the distribution of 73 hours of full-motion video (FMV) captured by Air National Guard MQ-9 Reapers. This near real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) video was transported across a network using Haivision Kraken, for dissemination to intelligence personnel and ground troops dispersed across the training landscape.
Regardless of their physical location, viewers of the MQ-9 FMV were able to securely access a cloud instance of Haivision Media Platform. Army, Marines, and Coast Guard ground personnel also consumed live video on the Haivision Play Pro mobile app which quickly provided them situational awareness of threats that only the MQ-9 could capture.
Simultaneously, intelligence personnel at Camp Grayling managed communications with aircrew, liaised with exercise partners in order to meet mission objectives, and monitored FMV on the Stryke Lightning. This capability allowed a small team supporting MQ-9 operations to maintain a shared mental model and execute the mission using the same common screen.
