Colonel Jürgen Pirolt is head of the European Centre for Manual Neutralization Capabilities (ECMAN). In 2023, the decorated officer of the Austrian Armed Forces even “Soldier of the Year”. Since 2004, Colonel Pirolt has also been responsible for training all disarmers in the Austrian Armed Forces. Militär Aktuell spoke to him on the occasion of the exercise “European Guardian 24” with him about the challenges involved in the manual defusing of explosive devices and how the threat posed by bombs has changed in recent years.
Mr. Oberst, ECMAN was founded in 2018, but something like this doesn’t happen overnight. How long do the roots go back? We have to go back to the year 2010. At that time, the topic of disarmament was discussed in an expert committee of the European Defense Agency and the question arose as to whether we had mastered manual disarmament. Everyone nodded and then there were a few critical questions where we had to admit that we couldn’t do a lot of things. What happened next? The European Defense Agency took money in hand and financed two training courses in 2010 and 2011. I took part in both courses and then implemented the specialist knowledge I gained there nationally, i.e. in the Austrian Armed Forces. In this role, I trained Austria’s first hand unsharpener in 2011 and just one year later, in 2012, the first international exercise for hand unsharpeners took place – just like today. We held this exercise in Austria. We then held the first international course in 2013 and the rest is history. https://militaeraktuell.at/rheinmetall-zeigte-ganzes-mission-master-portfolio/ That means that there was a kind of precursor project before ECMAN was officially founded, if I understand you correctly? Yes, that ran from 2014 to the end of 2017 and was funded by five nations who were trained by the Austrians. The next step was the institutionalization of this training center, which took place in 2018. How did Austria come to be in charge here? Did this perhaps also have something to do with the expertise they had due to the letter bomb attacker Franz Fuchs? That certainly played a role, but we simply had a good training curriculum. Keyword training. What are the basic requirements for a soldier who wants to become a hand sharpener? The manual defuser training is the final part of the defuser training, which takes around three years in total. A professional technical background is ideal, for example a technical college or a qualification as an electrical engineer or car mechanic. But this is not essential. You also need to have been deployed abroad at least once. https://militaeraktuell.at/64-soldatenwallfahrt-nach-lourdes-beendet/ What are the psychological requirements? Despite the great danger we are in and the associated high level of stress, you have to be able to remain calm in order to take on the challenge. We have to evaluate the data and facts we have, draw the right conclusions and then implement them to successfully defuse the situation. To what extent has the job of bomb disposal changed in recent years? If we go back to the 1990s, to Franz Fuchs’ bombs, this can be well illustrated. He soldered his letter bombs together himself from individual parts and constructed his circuits, tested whether they worked and also built the detonators himself. He had specialist knowledge in electrical engineering and chemistry. Nowadays you can buy a so-called small circuit board with a relay on the Internet or from an electrical retailer. I connect the battery to one side and the igniter to the other. I no longer need any basic knowledge. That’s the technical progress and the other factor is that terrorists have also discovered the Internet for themselves. There are bomb-making instructions and even tips on how to get which parts where in order to stay under the radar of the authorities.
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