St. Kitts-Nevis to host 2015 Tradewinds Regional Exercise

(ZIZ News) — St. Kitts-Nevis is preparing to host the 2015 Tradewinds Regional Exercise which will be sponsored by the United States Southern Command.

Planned for May 31st to June 9th 2015, the event is expected to address issues relating to communication, coordination, management of information and the response to certain scenarios.

On Monday, National Disaster Coordinator, Carl Herbert delivered remarks at the opening ceremony of the Emergency Operations Centre [EOC] Workshop. This workshop is a precursor to the May-June event.

“Tradewinds is a regional exercise which involves security forces from CARICOM and RSS countries along with partners from beyond the region: USA, United Kingdom, the French and a few other countries that come together annually to train, to practise in the event that there needs to be ongoing collaboration if they have to be mobilised should a hazard impact,” Herbert explained.

Herbert said the Tradewinds exercise is an opportunity to build relationships among partners and strengthen the coordination between security forces.

He said, “The exercise is in two phases. Phase one on St. Kitts-Nevis will be a maritime phase with a disaster management component and phase two, a few weeks later in Belize that will address the land phase which will mainly be security in action. The St. Kitts-Nevis Defence Force is the lead agency for Tradewinds.”

Tradewinds supports the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), as well as U.S. Southern Command’s theatre security engagement goal of building partner nation capacity at the tactical and operational levels.