French and Spanish legionnaries train in urban combat in France

Spanish and French soldiers in the exercise

More than 400 French and Spanish legionnaires carried out urban combat exercises, from January 28th to February 9th, at the Training Center for Urban Areas located in the French town of Sissonne, an international reference center in Europe for training in this type of operations.

The 150 Spanish soldiers who participated in the exercise came from the "Colón" Combat Group, together with a nucleus of sappers, -all of them from the "Alfonso XIII" II Brigade of the Legion, and were integrated with the 1st Regiment of Engineers of the French Foreign Legion.

The main objective of this exercise was to consolidate the planning and procedures of offensive and defensive operations, the integration with armored vehicles, as well as the use of different capabilities within the 1st Regiment.

For this, the use by the Spanish legionnaries of the support of artillery fire, the support of engineers, the use of drones at the company and section level, or the health evacuations from the vanguard to the rear were key.

The almost two weeks of exercise served to recover the pulse at the beginning of the year of the operations that the Combat Group "Colón" has been carrying out; to further unite its subordinate units and consolidate the expeditionary character with this type of deployments, in addition to achieving interoperability between Spanish and French units.