I was in the exercise northern forest 21 and actually were the squad leader of Combat camera team! We edited the whole video in 48h hours after the exercise so it could be published soon after the exercise! Combat camera man Seargent järvinen ;)
During the wars Finland was on the receiving end of some of the biggest artillery barrages in the history of warfare - the mass of the soviet artillery had a quality of its own. In the Battle of Tali-Ihantala, 100km front had an average of 1 Soviet tube per 10 meters. Finland learned from this - and now not only being largest in Europe - it is also arguably some of the best in the world.
@dimapez The finnish artillery also used a new invention, the finnish word for wich was "korjausmuunnin". This device allowed a single finnish artillery observer to concentrate the fire of a multiple batteries firing from different locations on a single target extremely quickly. At tali-ihantala the finns were able to effectively concentrate the fire of 21 batteries (254 guns) on single targets, a feat no other army could accomplish at the time. A captured russian officer remarked that tali-ihantala was worse than stalingrad, specifically because of the artillery.
As for the English used in the video - all units also learn to operate with NATO standard radio protocols, which are practiced during exercises involving units from abroad. This is quite prominent, especially in Finnish naval, coastal and airforce units.
Swedish is the second official language of Finland, but the VAST majority of the population is more familiar with English than they are with Swedish. So just using English to chat with the Swedes is for the best. Swedes too would probably rather have Finns just speak English than try their "Jag heter Pekka, Vad heter du?" -level of Swedish. Finnish youth are exposed to English all the time, but to Swedish only in the class room. Swedish speaking skills of Finns are like Spanish speaking skills of your average white americans. Of course there's the 5% Swedish Speaking Finn minority that can speak Swedish fluently. But you can't use the skillset of 5% of the population as the standard for the remaining 95%.
I was in the video, I was part of the mortar company and honestly it was a huge pleasure to serve for Finland even tho, I’m an American. I’m a Finnish person born in the US. Great to hear the reaction.
Ritva and Ruska pronounciation was pretty good, and i think they spoke english because brittish marines were training on that same exersice, not 100% sure but remimber seeing article on that on news paper sometime ago
English was used between the Swedes and the Finns aswell (regardless of swedish language being mostly common for the nations), as that is the Nato compatible way to do it. Airforce always uses english, as that is the international aviation language on the civilian aviation side aswell.
@@kcfacademy2496 only like 10-20% of Finns have sufficient levels of Swedish to hold a conversation to save their lives, lot more people can speak decent English
@@kcfacademy2496 I was going to say. Nearly all NATO countries use English as their base and a great percentage of all their soldiers use it...but I believe it is must for the officers.
Coastal Jaeger here! Uudenmaan prikaati/Nylands brigad is the place where we're trained. It is the only swedish-speaking brigade in Finland. As you say, because of the cooperation with Sweden, our radio language is English. I was a coastal Jaeger but then got transferred to reconissance, I got a very interesting year in the "Finnish marines" Missed this exercise because my company were on leave which is sad. No NH-90 Heli for me 😭
friend/colleague of mine is a reserveofficer in nylandbrigad. he has been called on kertausharjoitus so many times all over the baltics too many times so i envy it a bit
Hi Theo, yes I like the new format, I'm very impressed with Finland and their exercise they are very professional with very nice equipment, and the British armed forces were in that exercise probably the Royal Marines.🇬🇧👍
I actually believe we have the second largest (if you don't count Russia as Europe, because they have a huge number of ex-soviet artillery) the Ukrainians have more artillery if I remember correctly but theirs are older compared to ours.
@@paavolaurila2949 Obviusly if Russia is counted they posses very large artillery reserve. Ukraine in my opinion has less artillery capability compared to Finnish defence forces (not same as numerical strengh). It is important to undestand how fire control and tactical doctrine effects survibilility and effectivity . Ukraine do possesses strong artilley component in it's defence forces that said it will take considerable time to build effective and capable defence forces. If you have information or videos to share about the training or the doctrine of Ukrainian artillery please share to us for evaluation and education.
@@redherring3110 I very much agree with you, Finlands artillery is much more capable. I only wanted to note that if we only talk about the amount of guns then they do win.
That's what needed when you have a 1340km/832mile border with Russia, unless there is a nuclear war. We have actively maintained civil defence shelters. Like in the apartment block that I live in, they expanded the shelter and they check them quite regularly. We also have an areal warning system (for disasters or an offensive attack) that are checked regularly the same time every week. Nobody here has forgotten the war with Russia.
Nice of you to keep checking out FDF content. I took part in Northern Forest part as a reservist. I'm positioned within the command structure, so no footage of what I'm involved with for security reasons (our phones are locked away in a strongbox too when at the CP). If I'm not mistaken this was the first time the "final war" exercise for each military branch was at the same time and also took part in the same "big picture war" (as in, c&c systems shared the strategic data, usually you just see your own exercise).
i have been waiting for you too react to this video since this was my final excercise in fdf. At 5:50 im one of the guys with the backs turned to the camera.
Southern coast of Finland is full of islands and small waterways. It's easy to dump a lot of naval mines to all the main waterways and effectively make them impossible to use for enemy ships. The missile (land to sea) is most likely a RBS-15SF-3.
I'm not coastal trained myself, but I'd assume the truck is hiding among trees most of the time, moving to a more exposed firing position only for as long as it's strictly necessary, and then withdraw back to the greenery. Finland is pretty much covered in forests, after all.
If you are talking about the missile truck, we had one hiding in urban areas in Leijona-94. In Hyrylä. Don´t know the range, but I guess it had plenty still.
I would imagine not. The standard artillery way of doing things is to cut a hole in the forest with a chainsaw. Way safer that wondering out in the open. Just can't do that during training. We had to cut down a tree in one of the exercise areas because they changed the firing position specs(reduced minimum elevation) after we had already emplaced. The exercise leadership was not impressed.
My second time in your reaction videos! I was as a conscript in the MVH20 last december which you reacted to, and now as a reservist in the Northern Forest 21. We were told that if there was no covid, at least Norway and USA wouldve also participated. There was supposed to be 20k+ men in the NF21 alone
In that case the exercise would have been called Arctic Lock but since Covid most of it was cancelled, but rest assured there will be many big international exercises in the future.
Nice videos here, keep up the good work. Suprised who many vids are about Finnish military witch warms my old heart and brings good memories on my military days
@@birdiesanders7788 I'm a sniper. They train us depending on what the unit does. Sniper's idea is to provide support to an engagement. Key is to be efficient and provide chaos from priority targets so enemy will get as confused as possible. And not get yourself compromised.
My main exercise was Kaakko 15 in the december 2015. My entire platoon got destroyed by recce guys. Really good and neat work from them since they were done and gone by the time we got out and started to gather our resistance.
Funny anecdote about the Finnish defense forces take on anti-armour capabilities: the old field uniform from the 1960's up to the late 1980's had multiple hooks on it to carry anti-tank mines, I believe up to 8 pieces per soldier. 😁
cool video i didn't know the finnish military used the new Archer, mobile howitzer. the fins sure know what they are doing. oh and the Tash! looks good mate :)
@@kcfacademy2496 Oh ok thanks. It's I've been checking out about howizters due to the UK is looking into replace theirs and the archer is one on the list. I prefer the K9 from South Korea myself.
Nice vid! I liked the switching concept, made it cleaner somehow. Only noticed the sound lag after reading a comment about it ;) For more coastal stuff I would recommend "Meritiedustelukomppania - Opetuspaketti" from FDF-channel. No subtitles, but I think it would be pissible to get the context. I might have recommend ed this earlier, sorry if I am being repetative XD Hope you get some time growing the moustache! Coming along nicely!
English works as an official command language together with any other country. In Finland the comman language is always Finnish, also with the Swedish speaking Costal Jäger Brigade in Tammisaari-Ekenäs. Our minority language in Finland is Swedish. Good work soldier, from a Jäger Batallion (Santahamina the Military base island, Helsinkis defence) Staff Seargeant (in reserve)!
The lighter camo pattern you saw at 1:58 is the M05 cold weather camo. It was pretty cold and windy some days of the NF21 and looks like some decided to wear their winter jackets :D I myself was part of NF21 and Arrow 21 as my "final war".
Most of Finnish infantry are jaegers, they just differentiate between each other such as armour jaeger (destruction from the forest), coastal jaeger(wet boots), guard jaeger(city slickers) etc.
Unknown Soldier has the #6th highest movie budget produced in Finland, only at 7M, highest budget ever was Angry Birds Movie at 73M, which is quite alot more. Isn't it interesting how a movie can be made so professionally and to look so good, provoke emotion with such low budget? I don't mean to bash American war movies but they really romantizise and glorify war most of them, not all, but most, with huge budgets. Thats fine and all because you gotta get recruits somehow.
1:58 That is the cold weather variant of M05 camo. It has the light green replaced with grey to present snow/frost. 6:40 MTO 85 for "Meritorjuntaohjus 85" or "Anti-Ship missile model 1985". Swedish RBS-15 that is being replaced by the Israeli Gabriel 5. 7:50 Your pronunciation is ok, also the "Jehu" was pretty close. You are surely getting better at it! :) Oh and the start of the video had a slight video/audio desync issue. Maybe caused by the new setup?
English is the official radio language for Finnish military. I think probably for Sweden too. And that is for international cooperation purposes. And not all Finns speak very good Swedish and generally Swedes don't speak any Finnish so English is most often the best option for communication.
It would be nice to chat about these events but the policy of our Defence Forces does not allow it in a "wide" spectrum. In the nutshell we are allowed to talk about them inside the base gates :) Like your vids tho! Really neat that someone sees our nation's Defence work tho! Keep up the good work!
We use english when we are communicating via radio and we have to learn the NATO alphabet so that we can communicate better. But mainly we speak finnish when communicating via radio.
5:25 im there between the cars. Without the combat gear, on strong medication because of my back pain :D If you have any questions about what we did, i'll gladly answer
@@wanhapatu yes sorry I ment the cold weather summer jacket he's rocking... And while that might be more accurate I don't know anyone who had the winter m05 only those coveralls. And to be fair the white is snow pattern not winter.
We study swedish in school, but in reality very few actually learns it. Mostly because theres is no use for it in daily basis, english you need basically every day. Pretty much the same for swedes as their language is as useless as ours what comes to international stuff. So it might just well be the case while training with swedes. Most of the times theres also some small groups UK and US forces. I never had the chance to participate in these while I was serving.
You are doing better than most others. The movie, Unknown Soldier, is almost like a religious movie to us. The first, and original, version was filmed few years after the war. What makes it special, quite many actors in that movie were actually fighting in war against soviets. You should check the first one too and remember, many of those guys were actually veterans. Thanks for commenting our forces.
We have APILAS and NLAW's for destroying enemy Main Battletanks, and M72 LAW's for light tanks and APC's. ps. Every shot that they speak English is with Swedish co-operation.
My brother was in Ritva 2021 and he talked about it every time he came home, before and after the event. He is a boat driver that drops of the Coast Jaeger solders on land
Great videos, thanks for the eye-opening on no-bs reactions (especially for our little but sisu-minded forces). Without fair insight of third party viewers like you, it would be near impossible to have legit comparisons of this level, on different aspects and troops of militaries around the world. Sincerely, "panzer-jager" of '99, now a reservist.
actually on northern forest there was like 7000 people there (i was there too) and 2000 of them were reservist. didin't see much people or anything becouse i am scout so i was like away from most people :D
Some years ago I met a former Finnish artillery inspector. He hosted his German colleague in such an occasion in Lapland. The German asked about how much ammunition will be spent during that excercise. The Finnish answer was that due to some logistical problems only about 16.000 shots can be spent. The respective question posed to the German was: how much do you shoot? And the answer was: 64 (or so) per year...
Finns can understand Swedish, but not the other way around, so English is easier. Norwegians can understand Swedes and Danes, though we struggle with Danish. Finns can understand Norwegian and Swedish. Danes can understand Norwegian and Swedish. Scandinavia and Finland is strange in terms of linguistics, but it makes sense.
