Defence Team News: Ex CRYSTAL ARROW, Latvia
Video / May 10, 2023
Transcript
The Canadian Armed Forces are currently deployed to Latvia as the framework nation for NATO's enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group Latvia. Exercise CRYSTAL ARROW was recently conducted, as a NATO Combat Readiness Evaluation to validate the Battle Group's efficiency in conducting combat maneuvers.
LCol Craig Higgins: So, Exercise CRYSTAL ARROW is really the culmination of our first four months here, and it was designed to bring all the different sub-units within the Battle Group together to be able to do tactical tasks, offensive/defensive transitional operations, but together as a Battle Group, working for a larger brigade structure. So, we had the ten nations of the Battle Group, which are Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, and we are working alongside the Latvians, Danish, and there are Americans participating in this as well, and Iceland. So, fourteen nations in all took part in this exercise.
Capt Fernando Paños: We teach the units how to build pits, how to do trenches, how to protect themselves, and also how to use the different minds here in the Battle Group. Command to multinational company is a challenge, not only for the language, but also for the procedures. Integrate the support company in the Battle Group is also a challenging thing, because we know, we have to know, how to work with different countries, with different companies, and with different procedures, all in the framework of the NATO standards.
LCol Craig Higgins: So some of the challenges – I mean, the weather has been challenging. You know, we've gone from hot to cold, snow, rain, out here, it's been unforgiving. Some of the big challenges, again, just working through the language barriers. Working through the radios, the equipment. You know, fourteen nations coming together that haven't worked together before. There's lots of reasons why it couldn't work – we've never worked with the Danish before, we hadn't worked under a Latvian brigade before, so there are a lot of things that were very new to us on this exercise. But, what really surprised me and impressed me more than anything was that all of our soldiers, our non-commissioned officers, our officers, were able to just work through all of those challenges at the lowest level and just work those things out on their own to make the exercises a success.
Capt Fernando Paños: We learn a lot about how the Canadians will do a pit, and it's quite different between the Spanish way to do it. It was a very good experience.
LCol Craig Higgins: Absolutely. Each of the nations here has had a different experience, different operational experience from, you know, myself and Canada. So, they each wanted to bring something different to this. We all accomplished the task and, you know, the ultimate objective, the same objective, but they all do it a certain way that's different, so it's been really interesting to learn that way and to learn from their military experience.