Minister introduces amendment

SVK Minister of Defence Peter Gajdoš introduced, at first reading, the Voluntary Military Training Amendment Act in the plenary of the Slovak Parliament. Under the new arrangements, the financial incentive for voluntary soldiers should increase by 200 euros, the length of the training will be shortened from 12 to 11 weeks, and successful graduates will have easier access to enter the Armed Forces, Police Corps and Fire and Rescue Services. These changes follow from an analysis of the VMT pilot project, which also incorporates assessment feedback from the first batch of successful VMT graduates. The MOD seeks to increase the quality of the project as much as possible and to train the next batch of voluntary soldiers under better conditions. The MOD plans to go ahead with the training of additional voluntary soldiers immediately once the Amendment Act comes into force, with the estimated effective date of 1 July 2017. Annually, the MOD wants to train up to 150 voluntary soldiers.

The Voluntary Military Training project is aimed at people who want to undertake military training and gain basic expertise and skills that are essential to the performance of tasks across the SVK Armed Forces and crisis management operations. As part of the training scheme, the graduates will have acquired basic soldiering expertise and skills such as military tactics, personal weapon handling and firing, orienteering in the field, medical and topographical training. Additionally, they will have achieved greater physical and psychological resilience, self-discipline and the ability to better deal with stressful and challenging situations. During the specialist training phase, they will have developed knowledge of their chosen trades as a marksman, engineer, decontaminator and signaller.