Why is Urban Operations Training important?

How do NATO Allied forces learn to operate safely and effectively in urban environments? By training together. During exercise Steadfast Defender 2021, Italian, Romanian and Spanish troops worked shoulder-to-shoulder on a training course specifically built to simulate the close quarters of urban environments. Working across language barriers and exchanging tactics, the soldiers learned how to clear rooms and cover each other while navigating the course. Steadfast Defender 2021 was a large-scale NATO exercise, designed to ensure that NATO forces are trained, able to operate together and ready to respond to any threat from any direction, with over 9,000 participants from more than 20 NATO Allies…