CMDR COE celebrates one year activation as a NATO Military Body
Date: (01-04-2016)
One year after the decision of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) for the accreditation of the Crisis Management and Disaster Response Centre of Excellence, the Centre celebrates its activation as a NATO Military Body.
The CMDR COE was built by virtue of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Bulgaria, the Ministry of National Defence of the Hellenic Republic and the Minister of National Defence of the Republic of Poland and the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), signed on 28 August 2013 in Norfolk, United States of America.
The Centre has continuously developed and in some cases expanded the expertise in order to meet the needs of NATO capabilities in the field of crisis management and disaster response. The CMDR COE has provided robust training, exercises and courses. It has been also the host of numerous conferences, workshops, experiments and high level training.
On March 31, 2016, the reception on the CMDR COE Celebration of Accreditation was held in the Losenetz Resedence in Sofia. The event was attended by representatives of the Bulgarian legislative and executive authorities, diplomatic corps from NATO states and Partners, as well as guests from academia and military. Mr Dimitar Kyumyurdzhiev, Bulgarian Deputy Minister of Defence appraised highly the development of Centre since its accreditation. "_In the present strategic environment, the Centre takes on the important task to build capacity of NATO capabilities in crisis management and disaster response. As part of NATO's Smart Defence initiative, it will contribute to enhance the interoperability through research, analyzes, lessons learned, and sharing of information in the aspects of crisis management and disaster response_". The CMDR COE received an array of congratulatory addresses from ministries and entities from Bulgaria and abroad. For substantial contribution and merits and in respect to the first anniversary of the accreditation, the Bulgarian Defence minister awarded personnel from the Center - colonel Milen Milkov, lieutenant-colonels Desislav Zmeev and
Milen Dimov, major Stoyan Stoyanov, master sergeant Plamen Petrov and Mr. Philip Spаssov.
The present ambitious of the Centre is to become very quickly a key player in the Alliance's transformation process. The Centre's first steps as an accredited international military organization are aimed at creating conditions for the implementation of the Alliance's commitment to make full use of the expertise in the domain and to improve national capabilities in crisis management and disaster response and harmonize them with NATO's capabilities. Given the need to acquire a set of knowledge in the field of crisis management and disaster response at regional, national and Alliance level, the Centre carries out five distinguished courses, 3 of them are listed in NATO's catalogue. Currently the CMDR COE is taking part in several projects of strategic character, directly affecting the defence planning in NATO, as well as the understanding of the scope of the Alliance's future operations.
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