Gaminger Initiative

The Gaminger Initiative is a joint platform of its officially recognized officers' and reservists' associations, which works on a level below politics and the armed forces, towards national and European defense readiness and collective security. The main focus is on the role of reservists in the increasingly professionalized armed forces and the role of the armed forces in Europe as part of the EU and NATO. The Gaminger Initiative aims to help ensure that the greatly downsized armed forces do not lose touch with society and to ensure that the specialists and reservists these armed forces rely upon can be trained and deployed in a meanigful way. The Gaminger Initiative is dedicated to security policy and force relevant issues in Europe. The original aim of the association was to bring together the military and reservist associations of Austria, Switzerland and Germany with the new military and reservist associations of Central and Eastern European countries that were formed after the political changes in 1989 and to create a trusting basis for mutual information and cooperation. Participating countries are now Germany, Italy, Croatia, Poland, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Northern Macedonia and Romania.