Vantage Point North

Reservists from KarPr training in the USA along with the US NG. These missions would still be voluntary. Finland is drafting a law that would allow the Finnish Defence Forces to order reservists abroad in case of a training or mission that significantly effects the Finnish security and is in the "local area". The Finnish reservists deployments abroad have been strictly voluntary since 1944, but with the NATO membership and reserve based fighting army, it was inevitable that there has to be a mechanism to send out fully functional formations as a military aid to our allies. Another important change is that the reservists would be able to give their consent for a mission and then such persons would be appointed to a fixed-term public-law employment relationship with the Defence Forces. This solves the issues of how the reservists should be reimbursed and also extends state "insurance" coverage for the missions. Law would also increase the max refresher training days ...

SRA competitor with a tst-class equipment (Photo by: Heli Soini) I’ve been shooting the Practical Shooting aka. IPSC for the past 15 years and unlike most of my peers, I haven’t competed in its Finnish cousin SRA or Sovellettu Reservilaisammunta, that is roughly translated as Applied Reservist Shooting. This weekend I finally managed to schedule the mandatory safety course for the SRA. But what actually is the SRA? To understand the sport, we have to first take a short hike across the Atlantic in to the USA, where Practical Shooting was formed. It’s, as the name implies, a shooting sport that focuses on the practical and efficient use of modern self-defense and law enforcement style firearms. The competitions consist of a number of stages that pit the shooter against a scenario with multiple targets. T he stage is timed with a shot timer and the targets are scored. The final result is a hit factor that is calculated by dividing the score with the time used. While t...