Italian army

The Italian Army has recently become a professional all-volunteer force of some 112,000 active duty personnel, around 70% male, 30% female. A recent law promotes membership of the Italian Army guaranteing volunteers post-Army careers in the Carabinieri Corps, Italian State Police, Italian Finance Guard and Italian State Forestry Corps, amongst other state bodies. The headquarter of the Army General Staff is in Rome opposite to the Presidential Palace.

Operations

A post-WWII peace treaty signed by Italy prevented the country from deploying military forces in overseas operations as well as possessing fixed-wing vessel-based aircraft for twenty-five years following the end of the war.

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This treaty expired in 1970, but it would not be until 1982 that Italy first deployed troops on foreign soil, with a peacekeeping contingent being despatched to Beirut in that year following a UN request for troops. Since the 1980s, Italian troops have participated with other Western countries in peacekeeping operations across the world, especially in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East.

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As yet, the Italian Army has not engaged in major combat operations since World War II; though Italian Special Forces have taken part in anti-Taliban operations in Afghanistan as part of Task Force 'Nibbio'. Italy was not yet a member of the United Nations in 1950, when that organisation went to war with North Korea, the 1964-73 Vietnam War was a 'police action' on the part of the United States with neither a formal declaration of war, neither was NATO involved (as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the entire war itself took place outside NATO jurisdiction).

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Italy did take part in the 1990-91 Gulf War but solely through the deployment of eight Italian Air Force Panavia Tornado IDS bomber jets to Saudi Arabia; Italian Army troops were subsequently deployed to assist Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq following the conflict. The Italian Army did not take part in combat operations of the 2003 Iraq War; despatching troops only after May 1, 2003 - when major combat operations were declared over by the US president, George W Bush aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

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Subsequently Italian troops arrived in the late summer of 2003, and have been scheduled to begin leaving their southern Iraqi base near Nasiriyah by September 2005. Some twenty Italian troops have been killed in Iraq in the past two years - with the greatest single loss of life coming on November 12, 2004 - a suicide car bombing of the Italian Carabinieri Corps HQ left a dozen Carabinieri, five Army soldiers, two Italian civilians and eight Iraqi bystanders dead.

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