Abstract:

In the context of the war in Ukraine, “western” armed forces are emphasizing the modernization of the armed forces and fulfilling the requirement to defend the territorial integrity of their own state, and the concept of expeditionary forces is being abandoned. The goal is to create conditions where own forces would be able to effectively execute military operations under any conditions and in virtually any environment, even against Near-Peer Competitors. The engineer force's role is to provide such support as will give its own forces an advantage, ideally immediately.

Thus, a high level of adaptation to operational changes is expected from the military engineering officer. However, in order to achieve this, they must have complex professional skills in the field of engineer support, be able to interconnect individual engineer professional knowledge, ability to provide specific engineering groupings beneficial for the support of own formations, and competences to manage these engineering groupings adequately. The war in Ukraine only confirms that the development of professional engineering competences should be closely linked with the ability to act dynamically, flexibly and independently.

Because military engineering officers bear considerable responsibility and the demands for professional leadership and management of their unit are high, one of the requirements for performing the function of a military engineering officer is the achievement of a mandatory level of professional education. The goal of the paper is the development of the education of military engineering officers, whose competencies due to the complex range of engineering capabilities cannot be ensured by current educational programs, especially in the context of lessons identified from deployment of military engineering officers during the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The paper describes the scope of the military engineering officer's competences - the recent projected scale of competences and skills, in the first part. It also points to a wide range of diverse engineering competences and skills that tend to overlap. The second part deals with the issue of identifying gaps in educational programs that could be used as a basis for the further development of professional education of the military engineering officers, especially in the conditions of Armed Forces of the Slovak republic.

Keywords:

War in Ukraine, military engineering officers, professional military education, education development.