With a mission to train and increase the readiness of NATO partners, V Corps is building allied warfighting capabilities while strengthening interoperability in Europe, said Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commanding general of V Corps.

“What we do at V Corps is on the right side of the equipment being fielded,” Costanza said, explaining that he and his team are not involved in obtaining the equipment through Foreign Military Sales. Instead, they work with allied military forces to train them on how to use the equipment and develop tough training exercises that build lethal, cohesive teams.

Costanza, who has led V Corps since April 2024, discussed the corps’ mission July 17 during a Warriors Corner presentation at the inaugural LANDEURO Symposium hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Costanza explained that V Corps has a series of initiatives and seminars using the expertise resident in V Corps. His soldiers can help at the crew level, but they also can train their partners on how to take the capability and equipment to collective-level training and organizational-level maintenance, how to use and fight at the division and corps levels “or even, in some cases, with our NATO allies at the land forces level, because there is not necessarily a corps where it fits in,” he said.

As an example, Costanza said, Poland is getting ready to field 96 AH-64 Apache helicopters, so the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, headquartered at Katterbach Army Airfield, Germany, put together a series of seminars on how the helicopters can be used at the division level or in support of the 2nd Polish Corps.

“Those headquarters don’t have that expertise, so we can help to provide that collective training,” Costanza. “We talked about that, we talked about phase maintenance and how to execute [that], and the Poles are going through five or six iterations of that, and they’re running with that now with us in support.”

Soldiers with V Corps did the same when Poland fielded 250 M1 Abrams tanks, and the training was so immersive that a Polish tank crew participated in the U.S. Army’s May 2024 tank competition at Fort Benning, Georgia, three weeks later, Costanza said.

Maj. Gen. Maciej Jablonski, V Corps deputy commanding general for interoperability, said during the Warriors Corner presentation that six Polish M1 Abrams tank battalions will be at full operational capability by the end of 2026.