The international climate and the greater attention that the Italian government is giving to the internal security problems of the country impose radical choices both from the operational point of view and from the qualitative one of the forces to be put in place. These choices, the result of contingent decisions, can however conflict with orientations taken only some time ago; I naturally refer to the Military Corps of the Italian Red Cross.
This important component of the national defense system must not be evaluated only as a force for completing the medical structures of our Armed Forces in every possible theater or scenario but having matured over time a very high logistic autonomy, today it has the qualities of interoperability of the systems. , modularity and scalability of its basic component and a wide projection capacity that can make it the protagonist in every possible use scenario. Precisely for these reasons, the Military Corps of the Italian Red Cross is considered, together with the National Fire Brigade Corps, among the main actors of any planning of the national Civil Defense systems, before the Armed Forces and Police themselves.
Over time, its staff, for the most part reservist, has acquired a high NBCR response capacity and can count on its own Field Decontamination Units able to implement an important protection of the population in the event of serious anthropic events such as terrorist attacks or industrial accidents. Even the structure of its own Health Units makes the response in case of emergency very flexible and rapid as these assets are already deployed according to the geographical location of the fourteen Mobilization Centers spread throughout the national territory and the major islands.
So much potential must now come to terms with a process of reorganization which, while borrowing the term from the 178 legislative decree of the 2012 which sanctioned its launch, is literally distorting the structure, tasks and purpose of a public institution born three centuries ago . The Italian Red Cross Military Corps is suffering, after drastic cuts to its operating costs such as to make it difficult not only to train personnel but also to properly maintain its own capital goods, a mobility procedure that in the early days of the 2016 , in full jubilee year, will have seen to reduce the strength of the personnel in continuous service to a quarter of the current availabilities.
However, the strength of the Cri Military Corps is the reservists, about ten thousand men against the actual current 1.300, who do not cost anything to the State, not even when they are called up for training or work in high-risk theaters such as missions Triton o Resolute Support, as in mind of that government provision cannot be paid. But they do not care, they will continue to do their duty with self-denial and the spirit of always, of course with increasing difficulties because from next January the logistic and formative contribution of their colleagues inserted in the permanent framework will disappear and everything will become more difficult . Just as the country and the entire continent are facing a new concrete threat, just when a rethinking of the national government on a strategy, born as a reorganization and translated as demobilization, could make the difference.
(photo of the author)
