POSTOJNA, SLOVENIA -- More than 450 participants including U.S. Soldiers, Airmen, and Sailors took part in the opening ceremony for Immediate Response 14 here on August 17, 2014.
Immediate Response 14 is an exercise designed to deploy multi national forces in response to a disaster relief mission. The exercise also improves NATO interoperability between U.S. forces and participating nations to include Albania, Denmark, Great Britain, Montenegro, Kosovo, Croatia, Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Slovenia.
"The goal is to build relationships and training because we don't know where we're going to deploy next, but we do know that we're not going to deploy alone, said Maj. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the deputy commanding general for U.S. Army Europe.
"If we're going to deploy together we're going to train together, but the most important objective is to get to know other Soldiers from other nations."
Participants of the exercise will be spread out in various areas of operations simultaneously between bases in Slovenia and Croatia working to develop a common understanding of multi national staff planning and procedures.
"We have to get to know each other first then deal with the difficulties of learning all the different military processes for each country later," Piatt said. "I hope the Soldiers get to meet someone from a different country and get a different perspective on challenges we face in Europe and across the world."
U.S. forces will be teaching classes, providing subject matter experts to act as observer controllers for the field training exercises, and provide support to Slovenians in running the exercise. Over the next 14 days Soldiers from the participating nations will be working together to build security assurance among NATO and allies in the region.
Maj. Gen. Dobran Bozic, chief of the general staff of the Slovenian Armed Forces said he is excited that his country is playing host to a majority of the exercise's activities and sees this exercise as a helping tool in stabilizing the region.
"We're really happy that we can host this exercise in Slovenia because we see this exercise as a bridge between the East and West," Bozic said. "It's always a great experience working with the U.S. because the U.S. brings some sort of stability in frame work and we bring some out of the box thinking, which makes our countries a good package together.
Piatt said he has seen the turmoil when countries don't communicate and work well together leading to mission failure and sees how exercises like this help make the U.S. Army stronger.
"When you come together in a crisis and you don't know one another you're not effective no matter how powerful your organization is an agency alone is not effective when it operates in an interagency operation," Piatt said. "This is absolutely critical that we do this."
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About us: U.S. Army Europe is uniquely positioned in its 51 country area of responsibility to advance American strategic interests in Europe and Eurasia. The relationships we build during more than 1,000 theater security cooperation events in more than 40 countries each year lead directly to support for multinational contingency operations around the world, strengthen regional partnerships and enhance global security.
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