NATO vehicles enter Giurgiu, 70 kilometers south of Romania's capital Bucharest, June 1, 2017. Eight NATO convoys with 300 troops and 150 fighting vehicles and personnel carriers entered Romania from Bulgaria on Thursday for a NATO exercise. (Xinhua/Cristian Cristel)
BUCHAREST, June 1 (Xinhua) -- Eight convoys with three hundred troops and over 150 fighting vehicles and personnel carriers entered Romania from Bulgaria on Thursday en route to a training area in central Romania as part of NATO exercise.
Part of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), some 2,000 troops as well as more than 500 vehicles and helicopters will gather in the Cincu area of central Romanian county of Brasov.
From bases in Albania, Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Britain, they will join around 2,000 Romanian troops and over 1,000 enablers in the NATO exercise called Noble Jump 2017.
The exercise is a logistical challenge that will test the so-called VJTF concept: NATO's ability to quickly deliver a fighting force to an assigned area of operations.
Operation director, British Major General Ian Cave, said Thursday that this exercise would test the operational capabilities of the VJTF elements and the level of implementation in Bulgaria and Romania of the Readiness Action Plan to increase the alliance's response capability.
Noble Jump 2017 began on May 29 with the arrival of the first British troops at the Greek airport in Alexandroupolis, and will last until June 22.
