Comsubin divers at the Northern Challenge exercise

(To Marina Militare)
30/10/18

The has just ended Northern Challenge, multinational exercise on the neutralization of improvised explosive devices (C-IED - Counter Improvised Explosive Devices) certainly among the most important of NATO which takes place annually in Iceland.

The 2018 edition was the largest ever, with over 300 operators from fifteen countries (Italy, Iceland, France, Holland, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, USA, Poland, Canada, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Finland), 31 Improvised Explosive DevicesDisposal (IEDD) ​​teams and 2 Search Teams.

The reclamation operations were coordinated by an international Command Center which managed the daily intervention of the C-IED teams. The Italian staff, represented by the divers of the COMSUBIN Operating Underwater Group (GOS), participated with a team of 4 operators, 2 evaluators of the work of the various international teams and a Staff Officer for the general management of the various events. 

315 terrestrial tasks and over 100 missions in the maritime field took place over two weeks. The latter took place in particularly rigid, but high-value training scenarios, with the temperature of the water around 3 ° C and the presence of gusty wind, which put a strain on underwater materials and operators.

The exercise Northern Challenge finally, it allowed to enhance an important aspect deriving from the IED threat which is the acquisition of the finds of the attack, in order to have them analyzed in a chemical-physical-biological laboratory of the NATO C-IED Center of Excellence in Madrid, thus favoring the increase of information on explosive devices (Weapon Intelligence Service) in favor of the intervention teams.