Engraved with Uncle Ho's teachings to the Signal soldiers: “To constantly improve the political and ideological levels and endeavour to learn more technical skills to ensure timely, accurate, secret, safe, increasingly progressive communication and make new achievements”, cadres and soldiers of Signal Brigade 80 have constantly strived to overcome difficulties to maintain the “blood vessel” of communication in all situations.

Signal Brigade 80 (Military Region 4) is responsible for assuring regular and mobile communication for the Military Region Command in leading, directing, and commanding the Military Region’s armed forces to perform military and defence tasks and being in charge of the communication “focal” of the Ministry of National Defence and mobile television for combat readiness, natural disaster prevention and control, search and rescue, and other tasks. In the process of performing the tasks, besides the advantages, the Brigade has encountered multiple difficulties due to the scattered stationing formations, divided terrains, severe weather and climate, complicated developments of natural disasters and epidemics, and unequal qualifications and capacity of the staff, particularly some aspects that have not kept up with the development of equipment and weapons. In that context, to maintain the smooth and steady “blood vessel” of communication for regular and unscheduled tasks, especially combat-ready, the Brigade Party Committee and commanders have concentrated on leading and directing the drastic and synchronous implementation of several solutions to promote the implementation of the “three breakthroughs” that have been considered an important and practical motivation and content in promoting learning and following Ho Chi Minh’s thoughts, ethics, and style.

Deeply imbued with Uncle Ho's teachings: “The cell is the root of the Party in the masses. If the Party cell is good, all the Party's policies will be implemented well, all the work will be continuously improved”, the Brigade Party Committee has attached special importance to the Party building work and improvement of the leadership capacity and combat power of the Party organisations, especially the Party cells. Thoroughly grasping and implementing Conclusion No.74-KL/ĐU of the Military Region Party Standing Commission on “Continuing to implement Resolution No.168-NQ/ĐU of the Military Region Party Committee and focusing on improving the quality of the building of the grassroots Party committees in the new situation” and Directive No.184-CT/ĐU issued on March 23rd, 2017 on building the “3-good and 3-no” Party cells, over the past time, along with regularly taking care of strengthening and consolidating the Party committees and organisations at all levels, the Brigade Party Committee has paid special attention to building and fostering the Party committees, especially those at the remote units, scattered stations, or units with difficulties, through diverse forms and comprehensive contents. Particularly, it has focused on improving the capacity to thoroughly grasp and concretise the superiors’ resolutions and directives into respective subordinate Party committees and cells and the capacity to organise the implementation of resolutions of the Party committees and cadres in charge. Agencies and units have actively innovated the process of making resolutions, inspecting, and organising the implementation of resolutions towards “practicality and effectiveness”; focused on solving newly arising problems or difficulties, backlogs, or problems; proposed solutions to overcome weaknesses that have been pointed out; actively reviewed, supplemented, perfected, and uniformly implemented the working regulations and leadership regulations on key work areas of the Party Committees at all levels; and promoted the principles of democratic centralism and collective leadership in parallel with the assignment of individuals in charge and improved the organisation and implementation role of Party commissioners and cadres in charge and the initiative and creativity of the masses.

Along with that, the Brigade has promoted the implementation of the Action Program for implementing the Resolutions of the 4^th Party Central Committee (the 12th and 13th Tenures) on Party building and rectification in association with implementing Conclusion No.01-KL/TW issued on May 18th, 2021 by the Politburo on continuing to promote learning and following Ho Chi Minh's thoughts, ethics, and style and the Drive on promoting tradition, dedicating talents, and being worthy of “Uncle Ho's Soldiers” in the new era; resolutely fought against improper views and internal “self-evolution” and “self-transformation” manifestations; and paid attention to settling the leader - commander, superior-subordinate, and cadre - soldier relationships to create solidarity and high unity in the Unit.

Checking watch duty at one signal station

In recent years, implementing the policy of building the signal force to advance straight to modernity, the Brigade has been invested and supplemented with a variety of modern equipment and weapons to contribute to improving the quality of communication assurance; however, it has also posed many difficulties and challenges in exploitation and mastery. To overcome this problem, the Brigade has made a breakthrough in improving the quality of training and communication assurance. Thoroughly grasping Uncle Ho's teachings: “We must strengthen the military work. First of all, we must always attach importance to the training of soldiers” and adhering to the orientation of the Strategy for developing the military communication systems in the 2022 – 2025 period, the Brigade has drastically and synchronously implemented multiple measures to improve training quality under the goal of “Being good at traditional communication, elite in mobile communication, and mastering high-tech communication”. Accordingly, along with directing and drastically implementing highly qualified and skilled technical cadres and specialists’ direct tutoring and training of new employees, technicians, and telegraphists, the Brigade has assigned newly-graduated young engineers to grassroots units to create opportunities for them to experience the work practice and play as the technical core to supplement knowledge for technical staff at the Unit. To exploit and master new weapons and equipment, the Brigade has actively selected capable cadres and technicians to participate in technology transfer and training courses organised by the superiors to update knowledge and compile unified training documents and curriculum. On that basis, it has established groups of full-time instructors to serve as the core in implementing on-the-job training and fostering towards professional assimilation training for cadres and technical staff of the whole Unit. Besides, the Brigade has focused on intensive training so that each person is both good at his/her expertise and can understand and take on from 2 to 3 other professional positions and training of mobile communication detachments at different scales in difficult terrain and weather conditions to improve their ability for elite and versatile communication and television assurance and survivability in long-term maneuvering conditions, or isolated in remote areas severely damaged by natural disasters.

During the implementation process, to achieve high efficiency, the Brigade has directed agencies and units to do well in preparing for training; promoted innovation and improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of leadership and direction of Party committees and commanders at all levels over the training task; and renovated the mechanisms of management, administration, and decentralisation in training and clearly defined the responsibilities of agencies and commanders at all levels in coordinating, synergising, advising, directing, and organising training. In addition, the Brigade has closely combined training under the basic program with direct training on stations, on the networks, or on lines and focused training with specialised group training and strengthened additional training and compensation training for weak and lacking contents. Every month, the Brigade has actively directed agencies and units to practice the schemes under the approved plans to improve the level of synergies and the ability to handle communication situations of cadres, employees, and soldiers of duty shifts and crews. Thanks to the above practical measures, the organisational level and practical capacity of the cadres, technical staff, and soldiers of the Brigade have been significantly improved. In 2021, the Brigade's specialised training test results reached 100% of good and excellent. 100% of the staff were trained according to decentralisation, of which 88.6% were good and excellent. The Brigade was awarded the Flag of Good Training Unit for 5 consecutive years (2016 - 2021) by the Ministry of National Defence.

Along with improving the quality of training and exercises, the Brigade has focused on breakthroughs in improving the quality of regularity construction and discipline management to create positive changes in building a comprehensively strong, “exemplary and typical” Unit. Accordingly, the Brigade has regularly thoroughly grasped the superiors’ documents, directives, and regulations on regularity construction and discipline management and concretised them through regulations and internal rules close to the characteristics and tasks to perform uniformly and synchronously throughout the Unit. Notably, following the direction of the Military Region, recently, the Party Committee of the Brigade issued Plan No.68-KH/ĐU on April 18th, 2021 on implementing the breakthrough in “Regularity construction and law and discipline observance” and “Promoting the sense of responsibility of modeling example of cadres and Party members, especially leading cadres at all levels”. In particular, the Brigade has required agencies and units to concretise the contents of regularity construction in all aspects of work and promote the presiding and coordinating role of political and advisory agencies in performing the functions of advising, guiding, inspecting, and evaluating results to ensure consistency, rigor, and non-overlapping; regularly maintained strict regular regimes in communication assurance, especially the regimes of guarding, duty, and information confidentiality maintenance; strengthened measures to manage soldiers, weapons, equipment, and vehicles as decentralised, especially recruits, soldiers about to be demobilised, and soldiers at remote stations; promoted the building and replication of models: “Exemplary duty shift”, “Self-managed youth road”, “Five-good station”, “Three masteries in technical assurance”, ...; and improved the ability to ensure regular and unexpected communication according to plans and directives of the superiors. By positive and synchronous measures, in the past five years, the Brigade has had no serious disciplinary violations, the normal disciplinary violation rate is less than 0.2%; meanwhile, communication on the media has been smooth and always reached the rate of 100%. In particular, in 2020, the Brigade completed the task of assuring mobile communication and television for the natural disaster prevention and control and search and rescue operations in Thua Thien - Hue and Quang Tri provinces, which was commended by the Ministry of National Defence, and 5 collectives and 6 individuals were awarded the Certificate of Merit at the Army Corps and Military Region levels.

Promoting the results and experience gained, in the coming time, Signal Brigade 80 will continue to do well in preparing all aspects to be ready to receive and effectively participate in transferring new equipment and organising training, exploitation, mastering, and improving the capacity of communication assurance to maintain the smooth communication “blood vessel” and fulfil all assigned tasks.

Senior Colonel PHAM VAN LONG, Brigade Commander