Exercises

The military personnel of the Joint Support and Enabling Service, too, are required to practice in advance what they do during operations and in the context of national and collective defense of the Bundeswehr. This is often done in the form of periodic exercises which, in addition to preparation for deployment, might even have other goals such as the coordination of procedures with allied armed forces. In this respect, exercises of the Joint Support and Enabling Service are frequently designed as binational or multinational exercises. Particularly, when it comes to the involvement of other parties, it should already be tested before how to cooperate correctly and efficiently in an emergency, and where there might be differences.

Military personnel of the Joint Support and Enabling Service are rarely practicing alone. Due to their tasks as service provider within the Bundeswehr, they are rather frequently involved in exercises of other parts of the Bundeswehr or exercises at NATO and EU level. Here it is possible to practice in a realistic scenario what is part of the tasks of the Joint Support and Enabling Service during operations or at the domestic level in Germany. For example, the CBRNchemical, biological, radiological, nuclear forces of the Joint Support and Enabling Service practice in cooperation with the Air Force the decontamination of flying equipment and pilots during exercise Toxic Trip and once a year in cooperation with the Medical Service the handling of real NBC agents during exercise Precise Response in Canada. The joint land operations information demonstration exercise (ILÜInformationslehrübung) is also held once a year. In this context units of Army, Joint Support and Enabling Service, Medical Service and Cyber and Information Domain Service demonstrate to future leaders of the Bundeswehr, how they would cooperate during a land operation. For the specialists of the Joint Support and Enabling Service such involvements in exercises of others are particularly valuable, because they are similar to scenarios on operations. Even on operations, the Joint Support and Enabling Service is always a part of the respective contingent.

The Joint Support and Enabling Service provides support when large-scale exercises are held in the Bundeswehr, or Army, Air Force and Navy personnel are involved in large-scale exercises of others. These include military police personnel, who are responsible for security, or logistic personnel, who support the transport of major equipment. Exercises are rare that can do without the Joint Support and Enabling Service. The special engineers, for example, often set up entire container villages for exercises to provide sufficient accommodation for the training units, often even multinational units. And when other nations practice in Germany or need to deploy through Germany to an exercise elsewhere in Europe, the Joint Support and Enabling Service will assume an advisory and regulating role and provide support from route planning to port handling to accommodations, food and fueling – completely real and outside the framework of the exercise.