DT News Interview: LCol Filip Bohac on ex SEA DRAGON 22
Video / January 31, 2022
Transcript
(GG) 407 Long Range Patrol Squadron and additional support personnel from 19 Wing Comox recently participated in a friendly competition on exercise SEA DRAGON 22 hosted by Andersen Air Base in Guam.
The CAF squadron won the coveted Dragon Belt award for top-performing crew in the exercise and today we’re joined by Lieutenant-Colonel Filip Bohac, Commanding Officer of 407 Squadron to tell us more about the effort during this premier multinational anti-submarine exercise.
Thanks for joining us today, sir, and Bravo Zulu to you and the team on the win.
(FB) Thank you very much. Much appreciated.
(GG) What kind of anti-submarine training scenarios did the team take part in on this exercise?
(FB) So (exercise) SEA DRAGON is geared around kind of a crawl, walk, run format where they begin with flying against some simulated targets, then they progress to a more advanced autonomous, underwater target that they then use for evaluation purposes. And then it concludes with some actual live anti-submarine warfare against a real nuclear submarine.
(GG) And I understand this is the second year in a row that a Royal Canadian Air Force detachment has won this award. What do you attribute this to?
(FB) That’s correct. This is the second time we’ve been invited as part of the exercise. It’s multinational and it’s kind of in the format that it is now for the second year in a row. We’ve been fortunate to be able to send a crew and I think the fact that we’ve been able to walk away with the win two years in a row is mostly due to the exceptional training that our personnel receive. They feel prepared for this sort of activity, as an integrated anti-submarine warfare exercise, and it speaks to the professionalism and training of our crews and their ability to fight with the aircraft we fly.
(GG) Absolutely. And could you talk a bit about the importance of working with our partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific region?
(FB) Absolutely. The Indo-Pacific region is one that’s always had significant amount of interest politically, for Canada, and militarily. But it’s so far away that we haven’t frequently had the opportunity to work with a lot of those partners. So it’s a real treat to be able to do that because those are frequently countries that we don’t work with. (Exercise) SEA DRAGON in particular, is run by the U.S Navy has Australian (participation) but also has Korean, Japanese and Indian participation which are allies we don’t often get the chance to operate with.
(GG) We’ll I want to thank you so much again for joining us today.
(FB) Thank you very much for the opportunity. It’s been a pleasure.
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