GRAFENWOEHR, Germany -- 72nd Expeditionary Signal Battalion participated in Cyber Endeavor a portion of Combined Endeavor 11 which is a multinational exercise from Sept. 9-22, 2011 in Grafenwoehr, Germany.
The goal of the exercise is to improve North American and European military communications, and computer network inter-connectivity to help nations partner together in responding to regional crisis or disaster.
Sgt. Ryan Lalk, assigned to 72nd ESB, NCOIC of USA Battalion at Combined Endeavor said, our mission during the Cyber Endeavor portion of Combined Endeavor is to connect with Lithuania and Ukraine. Lithuania being our superior in the hierarchy of communications. During the exercise we are trying to get a blueprint of configurations so in the future we will know how to connect to equipment.
Cyber Endeavor has provided 72nd ESB the opportunity to learn new things as a individuals and as a unit.
“Overall we've been able to learn from the other nations network configurations with different routing protocols,” said Capt. Wilbert Thibodeaux, HHC Company commander, and lead OIC for Mission 1 at Combined Endeavor.
“I've learned a lot because normally we use different configurations and kind of do the same thing over and over again, this mission we started from scratch as far as the settings we have in our communications equipment we had to build up,” said Lalk.
“We got to think on our feet, and we learned about different modes of communicating to different pieces of equipment,” said Lalk.
“We learned that the US isn't just the standard that there are different standards that we can possibly end up having to use in a deployment. It's just an eye opening experience as far as communications throughout the NATO countries,” said Thibodeaux.
Working in a multinational environment brings new opportunities to the table in different ways.
“Its been pretty interesting, I've learned some things from the other nations, especially in terms of routing and our call manager. The other nations actually showed us a couple of new things on how to connect to their routers,” said Lalk.
“I like the fact that I learned how the multiple nations are able to integrate into our systems with regards to their forms of brute force tracking, command post of the future, server configurations, and their technology they bring to the table,” said Thibodeaux.
“The best is talking with other nations on a professional standpoint and working with them for a common goal,” said Lalk.