Loyal Leda 20 was a Headquarters Supreme Allied Commander Transformation sponsored one-level tactical (land domain) Computer Assisted Exercise/ Command Post Exercise, with General André Lanata, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, serving as the Officer Scheduling the Exercise.
It trained one Army Corps (Allied Rapid Reaction Corps) in planning and executing an Article 5, Major Joint Operation (Plus) against a peer adversary contesting NATO in all domains within its North-Eastern Area of Responsibility. The exercise took place between 10-19 November 2020, where all the training objectives were successfully achieved and Allied Rapid Reaction Corps had a venue to be evaluated as a Warfighting Corps Headquarters.
Loyal Leda 20 was the final part of a series consisting of three exercises, code-named Trident Jupiter-I, Trident Jupiter-II and Loyal Leda. This was the biggest and most complex series of command post exercises in NATO’s latest history. The first two phases of the series focused on command at the operational level. Loyal Leda 2020 was devoted to the tactical level, i.e. commanding troops during battle operations. Its scenario was a continuation of Trident Jupiter 19, executed last year, and included joint high intensity defense operation conducted in all domains. It also took into account the latest interoperability and allied compatibility solutions.
In order to protect both our personnel and NATO’s reputation, within a COVID-19 Pandemic across Europe and North America, the execution was re-designed mainly to establish a new distributed Exercise Control model with small-scale essential deployments from the initial 420 to less than 100. The total number of participants were approximately 1,400 mainly in three countries: Poland, Romania and the United Kingdom where robust COVID-19 precautionary measures were put in place including tests, social distancing and isolation of groups in ‘bubbles’.
