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Updated: 13-Sep-2006 NATO Speeches

NATO HQ

8 Sept. 2006

Video interview

with Lieutenant General Ulrich Wolf,
Director of the NATO Communications and Information Systems Services Agency (NCSA)

Multimedia
Audio file
(.MP3/2044kb)
Video file

Moderator:  My first question: What is the NATO Communication and Information Systems Services Agency and how does it fit into the NATO structure?

Lieutenant General Ulrich Wolf (Director, NCSA):  If a NATO staff officer is having a computer conversation from Afghanistan to his colleague in the U.S. for instance, or a telephone conversation with somebody here in the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, this service is provided by my agency. It's part of a three pillar... what we call in NATO the CIS service organization of NATO, which consists of my agency, the 3 Alpha agency which is responsible for procurement, development and research, and on top of this we have some sort of a board of governors with representatives of the 26 nations.

Q: Your agency's number one priority is to support NATO operations. Can you tell us what NCSA is doing here?

Wolf :  ULRICH: What we basically do is we connect NATO's area of operations like Afghanistan, the Balkans or the Iraq to the communication network of NATO, which binds together all major NATO headquarters here in Europe and in America. What we provide in services that reach out into the operational areas is again voice, VTC and telephone services.

Q: The NCSA is also responsible for providing CIS support to NATO's major headquarters and to NATO member nations. Can you tell me what this involves?

ULRICH: We have basically 10 major headquarters in NATO and with all of these 10 major headquarters, I have colocated what we call a sector which provides telephone service, communication service, data exchange service and video conferencing.

Q: NCSA is NATO's first defence against cyber-terrorism. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

ULRICH: You can imagine that the data network of NATO is target for cyber-terrorism... provided by specialists, provided by amateurs and one of my missions is to provide secure end to end data connection within the NATO communications network and to secure this and to provide secure information is one of my major tasks. I have a cyber-defence operations centre in my headquarters in Mons who does that business.

Q: One of the big buzz words in NATO these days is "transformation." So could you tell me is NCSA contributing to that transformation?

ULRICH: I would say we are not only contributing; we are part of the transformation. Communications people live transformation. What we do here is we are striving to get the latest, technically the best solutions to provide services to our customers and we form with our network the basis for NATO's step for step development into the age of network-enabled capabilities.

Q: As our last question General, can you tell me about your agency's greatest strengths and what are your greatest challenges today?

ULRICH: I think the greatest strengths is the people that work for me. They are enthusiastic; they have never learned the word to say no. And the greatest challenge is to keep my organization technically on top of the latest development which is, in the world of communications, hard work. And one of the major challenges we are currently facing is the number of manpower and the resources we get by the nations; you never have enough and especially in times of huge new NATO operational areas spread out all over the world, this is a particular challenge for me.

Moderator: Thank you very much for answering all those questions, General. Thank you so much for talking to us today.

ULRICH: It was a pleasure.

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