It takes 5 mins to shave off a beard if you ends up in a conflict where you expect to use your gas mask. On the other hand a beard is really useful in for e A-stan where a beard is a status symbol, thus most Sw soldiers in A-stan had one.
LOL, I bet it took them a good day work to recover that Abrams.
Seems like they got them stuck on purpose in order to practice recovery of them.. The support units have been put to test in the exercise, engineers have practicing on building bridges, clearing mines (
https://twitter.com/johansutinen/status/911739895034544128 ) etc.
The foreign units are mostly used as the 'enemy', Finnish Hornets are up against the Gripens, AH-64 have been sluggin it out with the LvKv 90:s (AAV 90), The USS Oscar Austin is covering the enemy landing while the Visby corvettes and the subs are hunting her and so on..
It gives our guys a chance to test their capabilities against the best possible opponents. It will still be 10 years before they are fully back in business but things are going the right way.
On a side note Sweden ix expected to decide to replace the HAWK SAM:s with more modern long range SAMS within the next months, the race is between Patriot or French Aster SAMP/T and unsurprisingly both systems are a part of the exercise..
