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March 4, 2019

The Biggest Failure Of Dragon 2019

By Lukas Ramonas

The exercise Dragon 2019 is one of the largest exercises in Poland and is held every two years. In June of this year the head of the exercise will be General Jaroslav Mika, commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces.

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The exercise Dragon 2019 is one of the largest exercises in Poland and is held every two years. In June of this year the head of the exercise will be General Jaroslav Mika, commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces.

The main unit of the military exercise Dragon 2019 will be the 11th Panzer Division, together with its subordinate military units. Participation in the exercise will also take not only the units of NATO air defense systems, but also a number of different units of the allied air forces.

But nobody knows how these maneuvers will end up, because the previous ones were a complete failure or, as the author of publications on mpolska24.pl said, the greatest disgrace in the history of the Ministry of National Defense.

Despite the "propaganda of success" and the high-sounding words of the polish Minister of Defense about the "restored strong army", the reality of the Dragon 2019 maneuvers may turn out to be completely different. The level of fall of the Polish army during the maneuvers Dragon 17 surprised not only reservists, but even professional officers.

It is worth starting with the fact that during the Dragon 2017 it was not possible to recruit the necessary number of reservists. The big number of persons liable for military service simply did not arrive at the assembly points. I wonder how responsible officers will cope with this task, if during the mobilization they have to look for 170-200 thousand people?

But this is one side of the coin. After difficult concentration, it turned out that the knowledge of biggest part of soldiers is incompatible with their specialty. And so the sailors were sent on reconnaissance, the pilots to the mechanized troops, and the gunners to ... logistics.

And the fact that people without a military oath (!) had been called to the exercises was a fat point! How to legally transfer weapons to reservists if they are still civilians according to the law?

During the maneuvers Dragon 2017, there were also cases when units had to wait 2-3 hours, because it was not possible to get to a certain area of the landfill and due to equipment breakdowns. It often happened that the equipment for reservists was borrowed from a neighboring unit, which did not train at all that day!

In addition to these problems was communication support. During the exercise used the old R-123 of the 1960s, in which the batteries were discharged after a few hours. Interestingly that training with this equipment is still being conducted. And for the insurance, the location is chosen so that communication between the troops is maintained using ... civilian mobile phones!

In fact, the work of Polish officers during the Dragon 2019 was focused on maps and virtual movement of troops on staff computers. There were also units that didn't receive almost any tasks for the entire period of Dragon 2017!

As well as the unsuccessful teaching of Anaconda-18, we can certainly expect another blow to the reputation of the Ministry of National Defense and the Polish Army in the eyes of international observers and NATO partners.

Indeed, not so long ago, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Yaroslav Mika, said that this year the Dragon-19 maneuvers would be carried out at the same high level as two years ago. And that's a bad job"



Authors Bio:

Interested in Politics, economics, The Baltics and sport


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