For the first time, more than 100 officers from the Russian ground forces' Combined Arms Academy will work together with the U. S. Army Southern European Task Force (Airborne) and the U.S. 7th Army Training Command to plan a peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operation.
The exercise, code-named Torgau 2004, runs from Monday to Saturday at the academy's Moscow headquarters and at an Army training center in the Moscow region, where officers will practice joint reconnaissance and planning, a Russian ground forces spokesman said.
Torgau is the German city where advancing Soviet and U.S. World War II troops met in April 1945.
The exercise "will allow us to achieve the compatibility needed for participation in real peacekeeping, anti-terrorist and other operations," Russian ground forces commander Colonel General Nikolai Kormiltsev said Sunday, Interfax-Military News Agency reported.
About 55 U.S. officers and "roughly the same number" of Russians will take part in the exercise, under the command of the academy's commandant, Colonel General Vladimir Popov, the Russian army spokesman said by telephone Monday. His deputy will be U.S. Brigadier General Jason Kamiya.
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