Malign influence exercise at Nordic Pine 23 today

MALIGN INFLUENCE DAY

Today at Nordic Pine 23 the training audience at the Esbo and Karlstad sites were engaged in the malign influence exercise lead by the Chief Response Cell, Carl Heath from RISE.

Carl initiated the exercise day with a short lecture about malign influence, information operations, subversion etc. to set the context and establish a common ground for the coming incidents.

The injects covered a range of events and circumstance that could occur in any type of organization. Unless the information attacks are being mitigated and dealt with, they may create a lot of confusion, damage and loss of credibility. Worst case they could also lead to damages both physical and financial but also loss of trust och legitimacy. The latter is devastating in an open rules- and trust based society.

The communication between the two sites work smoothly, it is always a challenge to have the Response Cell at the JEC Site, exercising at two distributed physical sites in two different countries, but it worked out very well.

The exercise director, Freddy Jönsson Hanberg, was on site in Karlstad today and followed the exercise with great satisfaction.

- To me this is the essence of Nordic Pine, he said. We have Swedish and Finnish training audience on two different physical sites, a JEC (Joint Exercise Centre) in Kista coordinating the exercise, the Response Cell at the JEC conducting the game, EXEVAL (Exercise evaluation) on both sites following up the exercise, looking for potential improvements and also observers from countries that are considering participating in next years exercise. For me it is recipe for success, and I am very happy and most of all impressed by the participants commitment.

Malign influence is one of the concerns NATO is countering when looking at hybrid threats to the alliance including partners. Hybrid threats is continuously increasing and has to be mitigated both by each nation but most importantly in multinational cooperation, facilitated by different NATO entities.