EXERCISE INIOCHOS 2022

INIOCHOS

March 2022 saw the start of the annual edition on the full scale multinational exercise Iniochos at Andravida Air Force Base in the southern part of the Greek peninsula Peloponnesus. A large group of air and ground crews joined this annual multinational exercise hosted by Greek Air Force (HAF), and more than 60 military aircraft joined this exercise from several countries included France, Israel, Italy, Cyprus, United States, Slovenia and Greece.
Dino van Doorn, Hans van der Wilt and Bas Stubert were invited by the Hellenic Air Force to report for Global Military Aviation Photography (GMAP) on the 2022 edition of the Iniochos exercise.

ORIGINS

The origins of the Iniochos exercise lie in a national exercise designed to sharpen the skills of Hellenic Air Force pilots first held in 1988. When looking for a name for this exercise the HAF looked towards the ancient past of Greece and called it Iniochos or charioteer – the ancient forebear of today’s highly skilled fighter pilot. The initial planning of Iniochos was for an single base exercise to provide advanced training in planning and conducting Composite Air Operations, better known as COMAO. The early Iniochos exercises were based solely on Greek operational doctrines but as time went by the accent shifted towards developing interoperability between HAF units and air forces of allied nations, the pursuit of joint air-sea-land operations, develop means to integrate legacy aircraft and equipment with modern hardware in a modern battlefield scenario and to prepare aircrew for operations in a contested environment.

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MISSIONS

Andravida Air Base houses 117 Combat Wing and the Air Tactics Center. It is the Air Tactics Center that runs Iniohos. As Colonel Antonios Panidis, Air Tactics Center commander explains: “The single base concept INVITEX , which was implemented for the first time in 2014, brings together hundreds of participants in face to face planning, briefing and debriefing thus maximizing training benefits and promoting cooperation and exchange of ideas on tactics between participants with different experience. The exercise is characterized by an intense battle rhythm that is designed to test all aspects of operational capability of supporting a high tempo of operations and maximizing the operational use of limited air assets. Participants are exposed to multiple threat environments such as anti-access area denial: where long range Surface based air defense systems, 3^rd generation Red aircraft and TBM form a multi-layer challenge for Allied forces. Iniochos also leverages the exceptional flying environment of Greece, which displays large volume of airspace and a variety of terrain to present 4 distinct theaters of operations.” The Iniochos scenario begins with a crisis situation that gradually escalates into full war and is divided into four operational phases:

PHASE 1: PREPARATION
PHASE 2: FORCE DEPLOYMENT
PHASE 3: EXECUTION PHASE
HOT WASH UP

To enhance further realism, Iniochos is executed together with Hellenic Army exercise Polifimos and Hellenic Navy exercise Astrapi.