“The cyberspace has opened up a new domain of warfare!” said Defence Minister Dr. Csaba Hende during a conference held in the Árpád room of the County Hall in Debrecen under the title “Hungary in a Constantly Renewing NATO” by the Hungarian Atlantic Council on Thursday, November 24. The event was preceded by the opening of the exhibition entitled “From the Hungarian People’s Army to NATO membership”.

In his presentation, Dr. Csaba Hende compared security to air, saying that it’s only natural as long as it is available, but once it has run out, we immediately start gasping for it. Talking about Hungary’s commitments arising from our NATO membership, he said that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, nobody can act as a free rider because “sooner or later they’ll be kicked out of the tram”.

The Defence Minister stressed that the cyberspace has opened up a new domain of warfare, whose significance is well attested by the earlier cyber attack on Georgia or the one that destroyed Estonia’s system of public administration, or again by the fact that the Chinese military has a staff of 100,000 people working only in this field.

MoD State Secretary for Public Administration Lajos Fodor delivered a lecture, in which he said that we can adequately represent our national interests through international military operations. He emphasized that it is an unwritten custom in NATO that 10% of the member states’ land forces are deployed in operations. More than 1,000 Hungarian troops are serving on missions abroad on a permanent basis, from the Balkans to Afghanistan to Cyprus, but they are present in Uganda as well, for instance.

Prior to the conference Col. Dr. Vilmos Kovács, the Commandant of the MoD Military History Institute and Museum opened the exhibition “From the Hungarian People’s Army to NATO membership”.

(Ministry of Defence)