On 7 – 9 February 2023, the Hellenic National Defence General Staff (HNDGS) organised the Workshop “NATO use of civil standards” at the Hellenic Armed Forces Officers Club premises, in Athens, Greece.
The main theme of the workshop was to bridge the gap in civil military-cooperation and defence standards on Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDTs) and was run under the motto: “Civil as possible, Military only as necessary”. The workshop was offered to NATO Standardisation Subject Matter Experts, National standardisation bodies, members of civil Standardisation Technical Committees, and defence industry SMEs. Various EC agencies also attended such as the European Defence Agency (EDA) and DG Defence Industry and Space (DEFIS). In total, around 200 participants were present at the workshop.
Grigore Havarneanu was invited to give a lecture at the workshop on behalf of the UIC Security Division. He also contributed to the discussion in one of the panels which focused on “EDTs in Ops”. The presentation, entitled “Towards a better harmonisation of CBRNe procedures,” started with a short introduction of UIC and its security activities and then focused on the EU-funded H2020 project PROACTIVE. It highlighted some results from the PROACTIVE analysis of CBRNe Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) and the lessons learned from the two field training exercises implemented in 2022. Both exercises dealt with a chemical incident in a railway scenario and involved testing CBRNe SOPs with civilian volunteers recruited from the general public. The evaluation reports of the exercises are available on the project website and the exercise videos can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/@PROACTIVE_EU/videos
This NATO workshop was an excellent opportunity to disseminate the PROACTIVE results within the defence sector, to discuss about standardisation as a post-project exploitation strategy in the CBRNe domain, and to foster discussions between expert groups working in the defence, standardisation and research areas.
The event also allowed UIC to extend the PROACTIVE external network by recruiting new experts in the Practitioner Stakeholder Advisory Board (PSAB). Finally, the workshop was an excellent opportunity to strengthen the knowledge transfer and synergies with the EU-funded project HoloZcan which was also present at the event.
PROACTIVE can be followed on Twitter (@PROACTIVE_EU) as well as on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/proactive-eu/) and the project website https://proactive-h2020.eu/.
