Lieutenant Colonel Mika Mäenpää

Commandant of the Armour School Finnish Army

Lieutenant colonel Mika Mäenpää is a highly experienced armour corps officer and tactician. He is Commandant of the Finnish Army Armour School (part of the Army academy) and Head Finnish Defence Forces Armoured Forces Centre of Excellence. Shaped by a career spent at different fields of Armour Corps and specialised to tactics and operational art, he has served operationally in Afghanistan at ISAF operation and in Mali at EUTM Mali operation. He is passionate about developing operational art, developing combined arms warfare and building capable forces to modern battlefield by training future leaders of Armoured Corps. He has served in his career on seven different armoured vehicle platforms ranging from T-55M and T-72M1 to Leopard 2A6 and from BMP-1 to CV9030FIN. Serving 26 years in Armoured Corps and seeing Finnish Army transforming from Soviet era AFV's to Western AFV's has given him a unique view to Russian type of equipment and their armour tactics. As a staff officer, he has worked in Corps level Headquarters as G5 planner, DACOS G3 and ACOS Operations on South-Eastern Finland with that command having 200km of border with Russia. Later he worked in Army Command, as a lead planner G35. Along being responsible of Finnish army current LAND OPPLAN, during his time he participated heavily NATO RP-C planning after Finland's NATO membership in 2023. Also he was developing JEF and bi-national plans with various countries as an Finnish Army representative during that timeframe. He holds a Master's degree in Military Sciences from the National Defence University and has graduated General Staff Officers Course. He has made both of his thesis from the field of Operational Art and he has also served in Army Research Centre as an Armoured warfare researcher. He has been married for 22 years with lovely Sanna and a proud father of three: twins Sara & Siiri (17) and Samuel (10). He is vivid aficionado of Crossfit and is a passionate Shooter particularity in Military Sniping. He holds Military Sniping Finnish Championships Gold from 2015 and 2024 he was 3th with his Sniper pair. He has also represented Finnish Army twice in USAEUR-AF Best Sniper Team Competition (2018 & 2025)