LAGER AULENBACH, Germany, 23 May 2006. Cisco Systems has been selected to provide the core network infrastructure for Combined Endeavor 2006, a two-week operation designed to test the interoperability of communication systems for multinational forces deployed in humanitarian, peacekeeping, and disaster relief efforts.

More than 1000 tests will focus on the ability to pass data with a high level of security over an Internet Protocol (IP) backbone, using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), private mobile radio, high-frequency, and satellite communications.

In cooperation with the German Ministry of Defense, the U.S. European Command is sponsoring the communications and information systems interoperability exercise. Forty-one nations are taking part, including NATO, Partnership for Peace, and others.

"Combined Endeavor 2006 is breaking new ground in many of the network areas that are being tested, such as in multinational information sharing," says Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Verbeck, the director of the International Interoperability, Concepts and Experimentation Directorate (ECJ9). "Our goal is to tackle these types of challenges long before the call comes to deploy, certainly as part of Phase Zero operations."

"As military units worldwide are being challenged to perform at ever higher levels in conflicts and disaster recoveries, multinational forces are increasingly driving to an IP standard," says Kevin MacRitchie, vice president of Global Defense Space and Security for Cisco's Global Government Services Group.

Combined Endeavor 2006 (CE 06) is the 12th in a series of U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) sponsored "in-spirit-of" (ISO) Partnership for Peace (PfP) exercises planned and executed to identify, test, and document command, control, communications, and computer systems (C4) and information systems (CIS) interoperability between NATO and PfP nations' fielded military strategic and tactical communications information equipment systems.