Blog Posts tagged with "Austria"

This past weekend I had the pleasure of meeting the national delegations at Combined Endeavor 2009’s regional site at Bülows Kaserne, Fredericia, Denmark. Delegations at this site are from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Slovenia and Sweden with additional support personnel from the United States, Austria and Germany.

BÜLOWS KASERNE BASE, Denmark — Swedish Army Capt. Stefan Eklund runs fiber optic cable to his nation's workspace. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez)

Bülows Kaserne is nestled on the shoreline of Fredericia, which is surrounded on three sides by ramparts. These fortifications figure prominently in Danish history and tied to the defense of the kingdom. Construction started in 1650 and is central in the story of the battle to free Fredericia on the 5th and 6th of July 1848.

Our visit started with a briefing by the Danish delegation chief, Lieutenant Colonel Erik Schwensen, providing an overview of the site and his responsibilities as host for the delegations in Denmark. We then participated in the daily coordination video teleconference with the other regional site in the Netherlands and main site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

BÜLOWS KASERNE BASE, Denmark — Danish Army Lt. Col. Erik Schwensen looks over the ranks of nine countries during the Combined Endeavor opening ceremony Sept. 3, 2009 at Fredericia, Denmark.  (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez)

The highlight was visiting each delegation and learning of the tests they had scheduled for the week, the challenges in establishing the test network and the ad hoc partnering and experimentation that was taking place. They all emphasized the challenges introduced to the exercise with having delegations and their equipment spread between three locations, vice what had become the norm with one primary location in Germany. All wanted me to clearly understand the distributed architecture to support this year’s exercise injected a level of complexity that if not managed properly, could easily distract from their stated aim of testing, validating and documenting interoperability interfaces.

Overall I was most impressed by the genuine enthusiasm, passion, pride, teamwork and excellence evident in the working relationship between these professionals, each with their national objectives, but always willing to assist others where they could.

Denmark is the host at Bülows Kaserne and much of their effort was focused on site support and connecting the three exercise locations together with their satellite communications equipment…this is huge and critical task for overall exercise success. Their interoperability testing was focused on their preparation for support of the NATO Response Force.

Finland’s focus was on preparation for their responsibilities to the European Union Battle Group (EU BG) in 2011 with partners from Ireland, Sweden and Estonia. Testing for the exercise is focused on interoperability for this division sized force. Of interest was also their test of the NATO STANAG 5066, that defines how to send e-mail over HF radio, using four different radios. Most impressive was the description of a very simple, but elegant, solution to allow two nation’s secure radios to interoperate while allowing each nation to use their own methods of securing the radio transmissions with their national crypto. Simply brilliant! I was also pleased and surprised to discover that for the past five years they have conducted their own internal Finnish Combined Endeavor as a national C4I interoperability exercise. All of the lessons learned are folded back into the training objectives for their communications and signal forces.

Slovenia was involved in robust testing of single channel HF radios supporting IP networks and command and control. One C2 system being tested is used at the company and platoon level for situation awareness and can swap tracks of forces via HF, VHF, SATCOM and IP networks. I was most impressed that Slovenia is also testing elements of recent Microsoft enterprise capabilities for their tactical forces that we have not yet fielded within the HQ USEUCOM network enterprise. When delays in establishing the testing network, which were outside of Slovenia’s control, threatened their ability to complete some of their key test objectives, the cooperative spirit of their partner delegations sprang into action to ensure their partner would have the opportunity to achieve their exercise objectives. This spirit of cooperation is just one example of the teaming and partnership throughout the site.

The team from Estonia included personnel that were charged with the responsibility to establish their national signal and communications training center for the military. CE09 is the first deployment for Estonia’s new tactical communications system called ESTTACS. In addition to validating their new kit with their regional partners, they were also responsible for network traffic monitoring for the network in Denmark supporting this element of the exercise. Additionally, they also brought a special team to evaluate new HF radio equipment that might complement their current capabilities.

Sweden was in tight collaboration with the other EU BG countries testing HF and C2 systems. They were also conducting tests with Finland on TACOMS (Tactical Communications Standards for Joint Operations). The TACOMs website describes the initiative as, “…neither a NATO program nor a NATO funded project. Rather it is a project comprised of NATO nations and non NATO nations, operating outside the normal NATO infrastructure, and funded by the Nations themselves. However, NATO prescribes the projects Military Operational Requirements and Technical Requirements…” This project is an opportunity for collaboration and innovation between the 16 partner nations.

Ireland was keen on preparing for international peacekeeping operations. They too were very interested in the additional capabilities for HF as well as NATO compliant C2 systems. During the mid planning conference for the exercise, they decided to modify, through a very quick turn development, their national friendly force tracking capability to be interoperable with NATO’s friendly force indicator protocol. Initial testing indicates success.

No doubt I’ve not done justice to all of the accomplishments I witnessed in my short visit to Bülows Kaserne, but the biggest take away of the day was that Combined Endeavor demonstrates that we are all, as the US European Command motto states…“STRONGER TOGETHER.”

Next stop...Combined Endeavor's site in The Netherlands.

Brigadier General David A. Cotton
Director, Command, Control, Communications
and Warfighting Integration (J6)
Facebook: dacotton
Twitter: DavidACotton