National Guard brings New York flavor to Bosnian exercise

TUZLA, Bosnia — Members of the New York Army National Guard deployed to Forward Operating Site Eagle, near Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, May 8 to participate in the Combined Endeavor 2006 exercise. The exercise is being conducted from May 12-25 at FOS Eagle and at the main operating site at Lager Aulerbach, Germany. Fifteen members of the 101st Signal Battalion Bravo Company, Yonkers, New York, arrived in Tuzla prepared to play an integral roll in the exercise mission.

"Our mission is to test the communications systems and rate them ‘go or no go,'" said Army Specialist Ferdinand Montalvo. Specialist Montalvo, a radio maintainer will take part in the exercise by performing operational tests on the communications equipment of eight nations.

Nations participating in the exercise at FOS Eagle are Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina (observers only), Croatia, Canada, France, Georgia, Italy, Macedonia, Romania and the United States.

Combined Endeavor 2006, a U.S. European Command-sponsored multinational exercise, is the premier ‘in-the-spirit-of' Partnership for Peace exercise planned and executed to identify command, control, communications and computer systems interoperability between NATO and PfP Nations' fielded strategic and tactical communications systems. A total of 41 nations are participating in the exercise with the remainder of the nations operating out of Lager Aulenbach, Germany.

"If the equipment we are testing works," said Army Private Frank DiBattista, "we might want to use it ourselves in the future. Even if the test is unsuccessful we will learn more from our allies. We (the military) used equipment tested in last years exercise during Hurricane Katrina relief efforts."

This is an opportunity for the soldiers to learn not only about the communications equipment fielded by other nations but also about the other nations themselves. "This is not just a testing environment," said Army Specialist Brian Sanchez. "This is an opportunity to learn not only about other nation's military assets, but about the culture of those nations as well."

All of the soldiers receive training on the testing criteria by members from the Joint Interoperability Test Center, stationed at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The importance of Combined Endeavor 2006 is significant. Future European theater operations will require multi-national and crisis response operations. Last year these nations were operationally successful in real-world operations including: NATO earthquake relief efforts in Pakistan; Swiss Forward Air Control in Tsunami Relief efforts; and Armenian and Moldovan radio networking in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Not all the soldiers taking part in the testing phase of the exercise have a communications background. Army Specialist Bienvenido Llamas is a cook but he was handpicked by his company commander to go to Bosnia. He is just happy to be selected to participate in such a positive operation.

"I'm a good worker and my commander recognized this," he said. "It's good to go outside your area of expertise some times and try something different…something that has proven it can make a difference in the life of others."