Nimble Titan 24 Senior Leader Event convenes in Germany

By Lt. Col. Alissa ModrowJuly 3, 2024

LTG James
1 / 4 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Lt. Gen. Thomas L. James, deputy commander for U.S. Space Command, discusses the importance of the Nimble Titan campaign during his keynote speech at the Nimble Titan senior leader event in Ramstein, Germany, May 30-31. (U.S. Army photo by Dottie White) (Photo Credit: Dottie White) VIEW ORIGINAL
LTG Gainey
2 / 4 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, commander of Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense and commanding general of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, discusses the importance of the Nimble Titan campaign during his opening remarks at the Nimble Titan senior leader event in Ramstein, Germany, May 30-31. (U.S. Army photo by Dottie White) (Photo Credit: Dottie White) VIEW ORIGINAL
NT SLE 2024
3 / 4 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Senior Leaders from 20 nations and international organizations convene for a Nimble Titan senior leader event in Ramstein, Germany, May 30-31. The group discussed policy and operational concepts for multinational missile defense. (Photo Credit: Dottie White) VIEW ORIGINAL
NT Group
4 / 4 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Senior Leaders from 20 participating nations and international organizations convene for a Nimble Titan senior leader event in Ramstein, Germany, May 30-31. The group discussed policy and operational concepts for multinational missile defense. (U.S. Army photo by Dottie White) (Photo Credit: Dottie White) VIEW ORIGINAL

RAMSTEIN, Germany – Senior leaders and representatives from 20 participating nations and international organizations, totaling more than 140 individuals, met for the Nimble Titan 24 Senior Leader Event in Ramstein, Germany.

This culminating event brought Nimble Titan’s 10th campaign to a close, and with it a renewed emphasis on the value of the campaign and opportunities in the future to make it even better.

“The Nimble Titan 24 senior leader event serves as an opportunity for senior leaders from our partner nations and organizations across the Indo-Pacific, European, Middle Eastern and North American regions to engage in open, non-attributional discussions regarding the challenges of collective integrated air and missile defense,” said Lt. Col. Chad Forsythe, Nimble Titan deputy director. “Senior leader insights, discussions, and engagements contribute to increased understanding of our collective challenges in integrated air and missile defense and provide the opportunity to shape objectives for future exploration of policy and operational concepts.”

Nimble Titan, a two-year campaign set 10 years in the future, is the premier global forum for IAMD policy experimentation and concept development. It is a continuing series of campaigns that strengthens international partnerships, influences the development of missile defense policies and concepts, and informs missile defense capability development for nations and international organizations.

Nimble Titan began in the 1990s as a U.S. joint staff war game initiative before evolving to a bilateral war game with the United Kingdom and then to a multilateral war game with the incorporation of foreign affairs, defense, and military participants from Euro-Atlantic, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific countries starting in 2006, with significant growth since then.

“This campaign of experimentation is invaluable because it lets us learn from each other, rather than learning from an unexpected crisis. This is the single best forum for us to collectively work through these potential threats and challenges, and to illustrate the necessity of the partnerships and collaboration that happens here,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas L. James, deputy commander for U.S. Space Command, during his keynote speech.

“The Nimble Titan community collectively works together to integrate and synchronize the capabilities that we each have ready now and available today as part of a holistic kill web to enable any sensor, any mission, best shooter, and optimal command and control,” said James. “This will be an enormous undertaking requiring exercises, capability development efforts, displays of interoperability, sharing agreements, and more. Basically, it will require all the elements that we already do so well under Nimble Titan. That is why we believe that this series, events like this one, and the relationships we build are so critical. They are our asymmetric advantages over the emerging threat.”

Nimble Titan is organized and executed by the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense under USSPACECOM.

Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, commander of JFCC IMD and commanding general of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said during an interview with the Armed Forces Network, “I am here to support the Nimble Titan senior leader event where we bring in all our partner components and work together from a policy perspective of how to get after missile defense integration, policy challenges and how to employ it as a coalition. There is not enough missile defense to do it with one country alone. We have to work together, and we have to be interoperable together to make it work. It is incredibly important to maximize our capabilities globally.”

This global perspective to IAMD and space operations was echoed by senior leaders in attendance including the commander for the Air Force Europe and Africa, and Allied Air Command Gen. James B. Hecker. During his keynote speech, Hecker described two of the five priorities of Air Command as IAMD and information and intelligence sharing.

“The cheapest way to increase capability is to share information. Improved intelligence sharing with allies and partners increased from 30 points of interest per month to 3,000 with the stroke of a pen,” Hecker said when describing the effects of increased communication and policy changes after the start of the Ukraine war.

The Nimble Titan 24 campaign began with the Campaign Design Conference in May 2022. Subsequent design and planning workshops enabled facilitators and participating nations and organizations to set the scene and incorporate dozens of objectives into war game events.

The senior leader event is the opportunity for leaders of participating nations to learn more about the challenges their national delegates have faced during the two-year campaign and also provide guidance and outline supplementary priorities for the next campaign. Participants in the event were given an overview of the campaign and what lessons were learned along the way. Divided into groups both regionally and globally, senior leaders contributed to facilitated discussions on current IAMD issues as well as how NT war gaming events address future objectives.

“The challenges for integrated air and missile defense are drastically growing with the increasing speed at which the battlefield evolves,” said Lt. Col. Andreas Schmidt from the Joint Air Power Competence Centre. “To keep up with these changes, we need to understand them and experiment with potential solutions. Since no one has a 100% answer in a constantly evolving system, the only solution is to gather as many experts with similar challenges as possible. They have the best chance to solve the puzzle and figure out what to do with the resulting picture.”