The Philippine Army (PA) said Friday, July 13, that it is continuously improving its assets and facilities as it recently bared two units of armored vehicle-launched bridge (AVLB) and a newly completed heli-mock tower, both of which are expected to raise the war fighting and disaster response capabilities of its personnel.
Lt. Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., PA commanding general, said the AVLBs will provide game-changing capabilities for the Army’s engineer combat battalions in supporting maneuver units by providing mobility during operations.
The AVLB is a combat support vehicle, sometimes regarded as a sub-type of military engineering vehicle, designed to assist militaries in rapidly deploying tanks and other armored vehicles across rivers or other gap-type obstacles.
The AVLBs were shipped to the Army by Israel and the combat engineer assets arrived at the Batangas Port in Batangas City last July 12. The procurement of the vehicles was made through a government-to government (G2G) contract and it was part of the second horizon of the revised modernization program of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
The AVLBs will be inspected by the Technical Inspection and Acceptance Committee of the Department of National Defense’s Procurement Service before they are officially accepted and deployed to the Army's engineer combat battalions.
Meanwhile, the four-storey heli-mock tower was formally launched at the 4th Infantry Division Training School (4DTS) in Malaybalay, Bukidnon on July 13.
The tower is designed to train soldiers in a spectrum of helicopter operations, particularly on Fast Rope Insertion and Extraction System (FRIES), casualty evacuation, and humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) missions.
“These past 125 years, we have seen the Philippine Army grow into a professional and capable Army for our country. And as the Army’s modernization program progresses, we are looking at a very bright future for our land force,” Brawner said.