Exercise in Italy Ends Successfully

Szöveg: Lt. Csaba Búz | 2016. december 12. 10:02

At the end of November, Hungarian soldiers participated in a multinational exercise held at Gemona del Friuli in the northern part of Italy. The main objective of exercise “EUROPEAN WIND 2016” was to enable the nations involved in the European Union Defence Cooperation Initiative (EU DECI) to harmonize and practice their procedures.

The EU DECI aims at promoting intensive military cooperation among countries in the environment of the Adriatic Sea. Established on the basis of the Italian–Slovenian–Hungarian Multinational Land Force (MLF), the Battle Group has been joined by another two nations, Austria and Croatia. During the two-week exercise, the brigade-level Force Headquarters (FHQ) of the European Battle Group (EU BG) had to continuously react to events, incidents and information in the fictitious tactical scenario.

At the same time, the subordinated subunits participated in joint training events and acted as role-players to support the preparation and evaluation of the primary training audience. As part of the directing staff, the group functioning as the high level command – including two Hungarian senior officers – were tasked with directing the superior headquarters, the EU Battle Group.

The international control and evaluation team of the command post exercise involved a senior officer at the HDF Joint Force Command responsible for certifying operational capability levels. The officers and NCOs assigned to the EU BG FHQ were executing their tasks in an international environment and finally proved, during a closing exercise, that they are ready for cooperation and that the battle group has achieved full operational capability (FOC).

Besides several high-ranking military leaders, Gen. Michail Kostarakos, Chairman of the European Union Military Committee also witnessed the Live Fire Exercise part of the closing exercise.

The Hungarian Defence Forces were represented at the event by Brig.-Gen. Dr. Romulusz Ruszin, Commander, HDF 5th Bocskai István Infantry Brigade. The commander praised the Hungarian troops’ high professional standards, emphasizing that “We, soldiers have the task of being valuable partners of those alliances of which we are members, and we have just seen an excellent example of this".

As part of the DECI-based EU Battle Group, the designated personnel of the 3rd Bercsényi Miklós Infantry Battalion, HDF 5th Bocskai István Infantry Brigade will enter its six-month standby period with a company-sized force in Hungary on 1 January 2017. Within the multinational battle group, besides the troops of the brigade, the soldiers of the HDF Civil-Military Cooperation and Psychological Operations Centre will be working in different positions to support the execution of operational tasks.

Exercise “EUROPEAN WIND 2016" ended with a flag-lowering ceremony of the participating nations.