On February 7th, the Lithuanian Chief of Defence Lieutenant General Arvydas Pocius, delivered the introductory remarks for the NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) Training Synchronization Conference (TSC).

Lithuania is the host for this year's conference that is taking place in the country's capital of Vilnius with the central theme being, "education platform for the future".

TSC is a Bi-Strategic Command event that hopes to play a major part in the commands mission to improve alliance capabilities and to continue to maintain and enhance military relevance and effectiveness.

The conference will last for three days and brings together over 200 participants throughout NATO and Partner Nations. "Unified and effective education and training leads to interoperability between forces and helps make NATO soldiers from different nations and military forces capable to conduct common operations." said Pocius.

He went on to say "This is why it's important to give NATO nations and partners the opportunity to discuss and adjust national and alliance Education and Training aspects – ranging from individual to collective training."

The TSC is an annual opportunity to synchronize Education, Training Exercises and Evaluation (ETEE) efforts and priorities among alliance participants who are actively engaged in the development of the NATO training landscape. Nations share information and provide better insight into the diverse education, training and exercise issues as well as necessary decision-making, are the most important goals of this 3-day event.

This year's conference has combined four separate conferences to increase efficiency and synchronization while assisting Nations and Partners in producing a unified training message.

"By reducing the number of conferences held each year we made it possible for the partners to participate easier while attending one conference with an overall theme of training and education." said German Air Force Lieutenant General Karlheinz Viereck, the conference organizer.

These four conferences are the NATO Training and Exercise Conference (NTEC), the NATO Training Group (NTG), the NATO Individual Training and Education Conference (NITEC) and the newest topic for this year is the Education Forum or eForum.

"The only way to increase capabilities across the alliance is to do more things together and this is exactly what we are exploring. This is why this conference is very important." said French Air Force General Stephane Abrial in his opening remarks to the media.

"Training is an essential part of transformation and one of the glues within the alliance, so we are prepared to act when our nations decide while making the best use of the money that our nations are ready to dedicate to defense." He continued.

The Education and Training architecture is marked by an evolution in-order to achieve a more effective training outcome and to build up efficient training structures. It results in new standards and procedures, improved tools and a leverage of responsibilities. It also attempts to provide insight into new evolutions, necessary to alliance-wide training command and control, standardization and interoperability.

"We have to integrate the nations much more into training within the NATO Force structure and we are looking forward to getting and gathering ideas from the 34 nation's present." said Viereck.

"We have over 200 experts on education and training which is exactly what we need to cope with the challenges in the future." Viereck concluded.

The outcome of the conference is to gain nations consent to advance the education training and exercise plans that were arranged in previous conferences. It also aims to provide a platform for discussion of new topics such as education while the majority of subject matter experts from Centers of Excellence and Partner Nations are in one location.