Good Work At Home And In Crisis Zones

On May 4, the representatives of the MoD and the corps of the HDF as well as retired personnel celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Hungarian Defence Forces’ NBC Service in Budapest, at the ’Pál Maléter’ barracks in Zách Street. The organizers, the HDF ’Artúr Görgei’ NBC Information Centre and the HDF 93rd ’Sándor Petõfi’ NBC Battalion have managed to find and invite many retired NBC servicemen, who took the opportunity and honoured the event with their presence. The invitees attended a special personnel assembly and saw a technical NBC demonstration. MoD Deputy Chief of Defence Staff Lt.Gen. Károly Hazuga represented the MoD Chief of Defence Staff at the assembly, where Maj.Gen. Zoltán Orosz, Chief of Staff, HDF Joint Forces Command was also present.

In his address Col. (eng.) Zoltán Szombati, Commander, HDF 93rd ’Sándor Petõfi’ NBC Battalion recalled the times when the service was established – on 1 August, 1950 the Independent Chemical Warfare Service was set up from the engineering service. In the early ’50s the first chemical protection organisations were established and on 4 January, 1951, a decree changed the name of the service from gas and chemical warfare to chemical protection.

The colonel spoke about the development of technical equipment, the manifold and changing tasks of the service in light of contemporary military, alliance and industrial environmental safety challenges. He also mentioned that in the past 60 years the management and structure of the service has been reorganized several times and today there are only two independent military organisations representing the branch: the HDF 93rd ‘Sándor Petõfi’ NBC Battalion and the HDF ‘Artúr Görgei’ NBC Information Centre, and as an organisational component and part of the HDF Logistic Supply Centre, Depot No.2 is responsible for special NBC material supply.

About present tasks and the future of the service Col. Szombati said that besides Hungary, our NBC troops, the number of whom is small but they are a dedicated team serve in several crisis zones in the world: in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Cyprus, but they have already served in Iraq and the Sahara as well. NBC troops earn the recognition of other nations not only on foreign missions but in joint exercises as well, from Slovakia to Germany and Portugal.

Following Hungary’s NATO accession, the service has been involved in alliance international commitments. Since 2004, they have been participating in the NATO Response Force (NRF) on a regular basis. The battalion has contributed to the multinational NBC battalion with a chemical and nuclear reconnaissance platoon and the CBRN decontamination company offered to NATO will reach operational readiness in the near future. The assessment officers and NCOs of the Centre are also involved in the activities of the NRF CBRN Operational Assessment Team.

On the occasion of the event, the Somos Foundation, a non-profit organisation for defence and security education and research; the Institute for NBC Protetion and Disaster Prevention, Zrínyi Miklós University of National Defence, Bolyai János Faculty of Military Engineering; and non-profit organisation Magyar Honvéd NBC Protection Scientific and Social Foundation have held a scientific conference entitled ‘60th anniversary of the establishment of the Chemical Protection Service’. Eleven essays have arrived to the competition and the awards were presented at the personnel assembly. The writers were looking for the answers to the challenges the NBC Service has to face today and examined the history of the Service in detail. Dr. Tamás Berek, PhD won the main prize with his study entitled ‘The direction of future officers’ NBC protection preparation in light of NBC requirements’. The non-exhaustive list of further competiton essays: Deployability of NRF in disaster management; Alarming challenges, professional answer – Hungary’s aerial radiological reconnaissance capability; Ergonomic aspects of the development of radiation measuring instruments; Examination of detecting clouds of poisonous matériel with the help of digital image processing.