Steppe Eagle 2008 in Kazakhstan
The joint military exercise Steppe Eagle 2008 was held on 22-27 September 2008 at the Iliysk training ground in Kazakhstan. Steppe Eagle is a joint annual exercise, which is conducted with the participation of troops from the United States and Britain and fosters the military and military-technical cooperation between the parties involved. The first Steppe Eagle joint military exercise was carried out by Kazakhstan and NATO in September 2006.
The main goals of the Exercise were to improve the coordination abilities of the commanders; to test the peace-keeping capability of the Kazakh and NATO troops; and to evaluate the readiness of the Kazakh peacekeeping battalion (KAZBAT) to take part in NATO-led operations.
It is noteworthy that the Kazakh peacekeeping unit has received the relevant training course abroad; by now, more than half of the battalion servicemen have higher education and excellent knowledge of foreign languages.
76 officers and soldiers were to participate in the Exercise. By the end of the war game 12 NATO military experts, military observers from foreign countries and representatives of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom and the United States presented their evaluation of the participant performances in accordance with the NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) agreed to in January 2006.
Location(s)
Kazakhstan