Arrabona Soldiers On Exercise in the Czech Republic

In the morning of Wednesday, June 24 the outgoing personnel lined up in front of the vehicles in the protected area of the regiment. After the order of march was read out, the 73-strong contingent got in the vehicles and left the Győr base in two columns with 21 technical assets. After a 10-hour drive, the soldiers arrived in the Boletice military training area of the Czech Republic. Having put the motor vehicles, weapons and missiles in a safe place, the Hungarian soldiers occupied their areas and were briefed on the tasks for the next day. The national officer conducting Exercise Tobruq Legacy 2015 is Col. Ferenc Kovács, and the contingent commander is Lt.-Col. Tibor Matyi.

The two main programs of the day after the arrival were the in-processing and the official opening ceremony of the exercise. During the in-processing the soldiers were briefed on the safety rules of the training area and the range, the emergency procedures, the logistic issues, and the general schedule of the exercise. All nations lined up in the training area for the opening ceremony in the afternoon. At the spectacular event, the US, Czech, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Slovak platoons stood side by side in the formation in front of their own SAM systems.

Col. Vladimír Barca, the commander of the Czech 25th Air Defence Missile Regiment received the superior, Brig.-Gen. Jaromír Sebesta, who delivered a welcome speech, in which he pointed out that this was the first time that five nations had conducted a SAM exercise with different weapon systems under joint command. The exercise director emphasized that this mission is not to be carried out in a test environment but rather in the field with deployed forces and live missiles. The brigadier-general expressed hope that the several-month training will produce the intended results and the exercise will achieve all its objectives.

After the opening ceremony, the international personnel had opportunity to get to know each other’s SAM systems on display, with which they will jointly carry out the live fire exercise. Prior to the tactical exercise, Thursday evening and Friday morning the fire units, among them the Hungarian platoon will do reconnoitering, run the system tests, and then deploy to the field where it will integrate the Lithuanian platoon and then form batteries to provide air defence coverage. There are two SAM batteries operating under Czech group command.

The Hungarian contingent will work together with a Lithuanian platoon, whereas the other battery is to be composed of Czech and Slovak platoons. The high point of the one-and-a-half-week exercise will be a SAM live fire exercise, where the nations destroy the designated targets with Mistral (Hungarian), RBS–70 (Czech/Lithuanian) and IGLA (Slovak) live missiles.

In the coming days, our report will be updated with the details of the tactical exercise and the SAM live fire exercise. The photo album of the event is continuously expanded on the Facebook page of the regiment.

Photos by the author