As well as in the last year, the JCBRN Defence COE representatives took part in an annual multinational exercise “Toxic Valley 2016” (TOVY 2016). This two weeks exercise is organized by the Slovak Armed Forces in the CBRN Training and Testing Centre located in Zemianske Kostolany. The aim of this exercise is to train and evaluate Sampling and Identification of Chemical Warfare Agents/Toxic Industrial Materials (SICA) capabilities in accordance with new NATO publication AEP-66.

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TOVY 2016 was held in CBRN Training and Testing Centre from 5 SEP 2016 to 16 SEP 2016. The whole exercise was divided in two different parts:
The first part – training and evaluation of sampling teams procedures
The second part – training and evaluation of performance and analytical outcomes of deployable laboratories

 

JCBRN Defence COE representatives participated in the first part of exercise as the members of multinational evaluation team. They played significant role in SICA teams performance’s evaluation and in collection of lessons identified (LI) during the exercise. 7 nations (BEL, CZE, HUN, POL, SVK, SVN and USA) deployed their SICA teams and 3 nations (CZE, SVK and SVN) provided their Deployable Laboratories (DLAB) to train NATO SICA procedures in compliance with NATO AEP-66 publication.

In support of first part, 7 different scenarios were developed to ensure that all major NATO sampling and laboratory requirements were met and to test whether procedures described in AEP-66 were applicable under realistic conditions which could occur during the real operation. In addition, all teams had a great opportunity to compare their procedures implementation with the others.

The second part was mainly aimed to prove quality of results from DLAB. DLABs were tasked to carry out CBR analysis of unknown samples, to create DLAB protocols and to provide assessments for the commander. After all, the most difficult part was considered preparation of assessments for the commander because all scientific data had to be transformed into understandable and useful information for operational staff.

Eventually, TOVY2016 was well prepared and all proposed exercise tasks were successfully accomplished.