Major General László Sticz
pursued his secondary and higher education in military educational institutions and graduated from the Kossuth Lajos Military Academy in 1988 as a mechanized infantry officer. In his first position he commanded a mechanized infantry platoon. After serving as a company commander, he led a mechanized infantry battalion.
In 1999, he obtained his master’s degree in military leadership at the Zrínyi Miklós National Defence University. In the same year, he was assigned to the General Staff of the Hungarian Defence Forces, where he served as senior officer in positions in the area of defence planning.
He gained invaluable mission experience as an operations officer in the joint operations center of the NATO Headquarters in Pristina, Kosovo and expanded his knowledge of international force planning within the framework of the Allied Command Transformation SEE (SHAPE, Belgium) between 2003-2006. After returning to Hungary, he utilized his international planning experience at the Ministry of Defence.
In 2011, he was appointed as the deputy commander of the Hungarian Defence Forces Military Health Center and later, as the chief of staff of the Hungarian Defence Forces Health Centre (including the Military Hospital).
In 2016, he returned to the field of the planning and implementation of the capability development of the Hungarian Defence Forces and the Defence and Force Development Program. Between 2019 and 2022, he led the Force Planning Directorate of the Hungarian Defence Forces Command, being responsible for the management of an extremely complex capability development system of the Hungarian Defence Forces.
From 2022 until assuming the position of the Commander of the European Union’s Operation Althea, Major General László Sticz served as the commander of the Hungarian Defence Forces’ Force Modernization and Transformation Command, a newly established command with the main task to promote, support and enable the Hungarian Defence Forces’ ability to transform and adapt to the challenges of the future.
Major General Sticz holds a doctorate in Military Sciences since he defended his dissertation in 2010 at the Zrínyi Miklós University of National Defence and in 2015, he completed a Senior Course at NATO Defense College, Rome.
Major General Sticz has been decorated with several high-level awards during his career, among which there are the Knight’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, the Golden Grade of the Service Merit Award with Laurel Wreath, the NATO Non-Article 5 Balkans Medal for peacekeeping service in KFOR and the Service Award for Migration Crisis Management.
Major General Sticz is married with one daughter, who also serves as a soldier and in 2022, she gave birth to a daughter, the first grandchild of Major General Sticz.