General Schook, who until recently was head of the Kosovo Force command, took over his new office from Major General Virgil Packett, who was appointed deputy commander of the 17th landing corps of the US forces in Fort Brag, North Carolina.
Speaking at the hand-over ceremony at the SFOR command in Butmir near Sarajevo, the commander of the South Europe NATO forces, Admiral Gregory Johnson, said General Schook's main tasks would be to end the SFOR mission and ensure the establishment of a NATO headquarters for Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as contribute to the establishment of a European Union peace mission, expected to start functioning in early December.
Johnson said that the NATO peace mission in Bosnia had achieved complete success in the past nine years and recalled that more than 515,000 soldiers from 49 countries had served in the country.
Of those troops, 150 were killed and 750 were wounded.