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EU: MILEX 07 military exercise

01 July 2007

From 7-15 June the EU Military Staff held its second military exercise, called MILEX 07. It was a so-called Command Post Exercise (CPX), with no troops involved, only staff. During the exercise, that took place in the framework of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), the EU Operations Center (EU OpsCenter), composed of military and civilian elements, was activated for the first time. Staffed by 76 military and 13 civilian planners, it was declared operational last January, but had not been used in the intervening months to the annoyance of some EU member states like France.

The exercise focused on the interaction between EU OpsCenter in Brussels and an EU Force Headquarters (FHQ) in Enköping in Sweden during a supposedly autonomous EU-led military operation (so no NATO involvement). The Swedish headquarters was run by the commander of the Nordic Battlegroup.

MILEX 07 was based on a newly developed scenario called ALISIA that is being used for EU exercises during the time frame from 2006 to 2010. In this case the scenario depicted a situation in a fictitious country (Alisia), where friction between the Transitional Government and a rebel group (the National Freedom Movement) had led to a situation in which the deployment of humanitarian aid to camps of internally displaced persons in the North-Western part of the country was significantly hampered. An already present UN mission did not have sufficient capabilities to address the situation. The idea was that the EU, at the request of the UN, would bridge the time needed for the UN to reorganize its personnel. The EU would virtually send 2,000 personnel including an Integrated Police Unit placed under military responsibility.

Some 200 `players´ and supporting personnel took part in the exercise under command of Lieutenant-General David Leakey.

Defense News remarked that the used scenario fused some of the recent EU military missions like short-term interventions in Africa, peacekeeping in Bosnia and the stabilization and disarmament mission in Aceh.

China Daily, 5.6.07; Defense News 4.6.07 (Brooks Tigner); www.mil.se 21.6.07