NATO Military Committee Visits Georgia
Szöveg: Office of the Military Representative of Hungary | 2017. március 10. 5:56Between 2–3 March 2017, at the invitation of the Georgian Chief of Defence, the NATO Military Committee visited Georgia. The Hungarian delegation included Maj.-Gen. László Domján, Military Representative of Hungary to NATO, who was accompanied by Lt.-Col. Tibor Mayer, an expert from the Department for Cooperation at the Office of the Military Representative of Hungary.
During the visit, the Military Committee laid a wreath at the grave of heroes fallen in international missions and peacekeeping operations.
On the second day, during a special Military Committee meeting with Georgia, the Georgian lecturers reasserted Georgia’s commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration and its continuing high-level contribution to collective security. With a total of 870 troops, Georgia is the second largest troop contributing nation in the NATO Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. At the Warsaw Summit, a decision was made to strengthen NATO’s presence in the Black Sea region, in which Georgia intends to play an active role.
The Military Committee also received a briefing on the security situation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions under the control of Russian forces.
Since the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, these two regions have increasingly been isolated from Georgia. Both secessionist areas are depending on Moscow’s support to such an extent as if they were part of Russia. The lecture on the reform of the Georgian armed forces revealed that the aim of the reform is to create a sustainable, highly capable armed forces that are fully interoperable with NATO. This will entail the transformation of the existing armed forces by NATO STANAGs, streamlining the structure of military command and administration, optimizing the allocation of resources in the defence budget, and replacement of obsolete military equipment with NATO-interoperable modern assets. In the interest of cost-effectiveness, the proportions of professional and contract personnel will be reduced and increased respectively, in an effort to create a pool of well-trained and available reservists.
In his remarks, Maj.-Gen. Domján expressed thanks and appreciation for the high-level contribution to NATO-led operations, and the so far achieved results of the defence reform. He reasserted that Hungary continues to support Georgia’s ambitions for Euro-Atlantic integration. During the session of the Military Committee, MC Chairman Gen. Petr Pavel had a phone conversation with Russian Chief of Defence Gen. Valery Gerasimov. In what followed, the session was chaired by Maj.-Gen. László Domján. As the last program of the visit, the hosts escorted the Military Committee to the Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) of South Ossetia, where its members had opportunity to look, from an observation post, at a Russian military base and the surrounding houses in Russia-controlled territory.
Photo: Office of the Military Representative of Hungary
