GRAFENWOEHR, Germany - Thirty nations and three international organizations joined with the U.S. for the opening ceremonies of Exercise Combined Endeavor 2014 on Aug. 28.
Over the course of the next three weeks, partners from all over Europe – both NATO and Partnership for Peace – will come together to build, secure, defend and operate a mission network.
Today’s operational commanders rely heavily on cyberspace in order to share information and intelligence, operational picture, and command and control data in order to execute kinetic operational. As forces operate in a coalition this becomes even more challenging.
It is this very challenge that Combined Endeavor seeks to master. The U.S. and it partners will spend the next three weeks training, operating and configuring to a common securable standard. This will ensure that coalition networks and the services they provide are not just secured but ready for commanders to conduct operations at a moments notice regardless of an adversary’s sophistication level.
Cyber Endeavor is a subset of the larger Combined Endeavor exercise, consisting of multinational training classes and a cadre of multinational experts to perform live cyber attack on the active mission network. Network defenders and information assurance professionals will work to detect, defend, and secure the mission network against some of the world’s top military cyber hackers and operators.
This year’s multinational cyber cadre possesses a wide skillset and truly represents the diversity of the partner nations here at Combined Endeavor, with cyber operators from Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and many of U.S. European Command’s vital regional partners.
Combined Endeavor is the preeminent command, control, communications and computer, or C4, systems exercise used for preparing international forces for multinational operations. The goal of Combined Endeavor is to foster stronger alliance and regional relations and security arrangements through C4 systems interoperability testing between NATO and Partnership for Peace nations’ strategic and tactical communication systems.
