Colonel (res) Boško Zorić graduated from the highest military school and throughout his professional career was engaged in the training of Air Defence Units and for the last 10 years of service he was responsible for creating, monitoring and evaluating training in the entire Serbian Army and the Ministry of Defense. For two years, he was acting head of the Department for Training and Doctrine (J-7) of the General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces. He is the author of a large part of the military literature that reformed the Serbian Army from an Army that was filled with conscripts to a fully professional Army, according to the highest world standards (NATO standards). He is one of the key officers of the General Staff who, after ten and more years of isolation of Serbia and its Army, returned the Army to the international scene, and through the implementation of hundreds of international exercises of units from the platoon to the brigade level. Most of the exercises were carried out with the USA, NATO, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria and many other countries. From the African continent, the armed forces of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria took part in these exercises. One of the biggest contributions to the Army, in addition to all of the above, is the initiation and implementation of a project to build the ability of Army members to use foreign languages, primarily English and Russian. From the Army in which, in 2010, only about 1% of its members knew how to use old languages, in less than 8 years, by 2018, over 15 thousand members of the Army had mastered one of the levels of language use, in accordance with the NATO standard STANAG 6001 I obtained the certificate, which enabled the participation of the Army, with units, in 6 missions under the auspices of the UN, in 2 missions under the mandate of the EU and participation in an EU battle group. This has enabled a significant number of Army personnel to participate in missions around the world as staff officers or UN observers. He is one of the initiators of launching a project called “Friendship through sport” within the international organization for military sports CISM (bringing together over 150 armed forces), where the armed forces of the countries created by the breakup of Yugoslavia would hold the Futsal Cup every year. The tournament is held every year in a different country, and in this way the soldiers show citizens that if they can forget the horrors of war, every citizen should do so as soon as possible and turn to friendship and not hatred. On the occasion of 20 years of Serbia’s participation in this international organization, in 2023 he received the well-deserved award Retired in 2020 with the rank of colonel.
