Introduction
Thales Nederland Land & Joint Systems is the leading defense communications company in The Netherlands. The company supplies both armed forces as commercial organizations with requirements for high technology multimedia networks, with high quality integrated communications systems. It facilitates a Battlespace Transformation Centre (BTC) that is used to assess new capabilities and to conduct a Concept, Development and Experimentation (CD&E).

Concept, Development and Experimentation (CD&E)
CD&E is a process where experts of different kinds of areas combine their effort to develop new (fielded) capabilities. It is an iterative process and each iteration (or small step) requires feedback from the customer as input for making small adjustments on the requirements. Not only technology is addressed, but also training aspects, adjustments to the doctrine, equipment requirements/changes, organization changes and many more, that is impacted by the capability. Simulation plays an important role in visualizing new concepts, demonstrating them to the customer and performing experiments.

(source: “Information Age Transformation”, Alberts D.S)

Thales has already experience in conducting CD&E. For instance, a successful assessment was made for the Dutch army to optimize the intelligence process of their Intelligence Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) module. For this, Thales was awarded the prestigious Runner-up Award in the category "Outstanding Achievement of a Defense Industry Partner" during Network Centric Warfare 2008 Conference in Washington DC.