Lieutenant General Ferenc Kajári

Lieutenant General Ferenc Kajári was born on 5th July 1967 in Budapest, Hungary. He is married to Veronika and has a daughter and a son.

Upon graduating from the military secondary school, he joined the Kossuth Lajos Military College of the Hungarian Defence Forces in 1985. He commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in 1988 with an armoured reconnaissance officer degree and a general engineer degree.

Between 1988 and 1996, Major General Kajári served in various Infantry Brigades and MI positions as a platoon leader, company commander, S2 staff officer and Brigade S2.

In 1996, he was assigned to the Hungarian Engineer Contingent of IFOR and served as an S2 and liaison officer in the staff. On completion of his deployment, his career continued at the Ministry of Defence, where he served in a number of positions, most notably as the Aide-de-Camp to the Deputy State Secretary for NATO Integration. In 1998 he was selected to deploy in one of the newly established Partnership for Peace staff positions, and was assigned to the Headquarters of SACLANT, where he served in the PfP staff element until Hungary’s NATO accession in 1999 when he repositioned to serve in the Education and Training Department until his return to Hungary in 2001.

From 2001 he was serving in different staff positions at the J2 Directorate of the Hungarian Defence Forces. In the same year he enrolled to the National Defence University, and in 2004 earned his Master’s degree in military leadership.

In 2004 he deployed to Darfur as an EU representative and Military Observer of the African Union Mission in the Sudan (AMIS), where by the second half of his tour he organised the S2 section in his sector and became the sector S2 chief. In 2007 he deployed to Afghanistan, where he served as the first Hungarian Chief CJ2, ACOS in RC-North of ISAF.

Between 2014 and 2015 he attended the General Staff Course of the National University of Public Service, where he earned the “ZRÍNYI Award” of the class of 2015.

In 2016 he was appointed as the director of the Military National Security Service Intelligence Directorate. In 2017 he was promoted to Brigadier General, and in 2021 to Major General, and in 2023 to Lieutenant General.

2021 marks his most noted tour as he was selected and deployed to the position of Commander of the NATO mission KFOR until the hand-over in 2022 when he continued his service as the director of the Military National Security Service Intelligence Directorate until his promotion to which took up to his new assignment to Deputy Chief of Defence Staff on 8th May 2023