Exercise Saber Guardian 2019 gets underway in Romania

NATO Exercise in Romania

Ştefan Stoica, 03.06.2019, 13:26

Exercise Saber Guardian 2019 started in Romania on Monday. Its main goal is to stress the cohesion, unity and solidarity of the partner and allied countries, with a view to ensuring defense against any type of aggression, especially by means of rapid mobilization and response, anywhere in Europe. Included among the many different training events at Saber Guardian 2019, there are vehicle road marches, a medical exercise, multiple river crossings and an air assault.

The Chief of the Romanian General Staff, General Nicolae Ciuca, gave Radio Romania more details about the multinational exercise:

“The most spectacular are the combat shooting drills and the river crossings. These are all extremely complex and require thorough planning and coordination, in order to render them successful. There will be Patriot missile firing drills, at Cape Midia and other firing drills at the shooting ranges in Cincu, Babadag and Smardan. Also, another important moment will be the joint air assault drill, involving more than one thousand people.”

In order to render international military training more effective, Saber Guardian is correlated with a number of other national and multinational exercises, so the total number of participants will stand at some 13,500. Attending are 14 allied and partner countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Germany, Great Britain, the Republic of Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine and the US. 7,600 of the participants are Romanian.

Saber Guardian was held every year between 2013 – 2017, and was hosted, in rotation, by Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. The exercise is included in the United States Army Europe and designed to improve the integration of multinational allied and partner combat forces.

(translated by Mihaela Ignatescu)