The UK’s 7 Light Mechanised Brigade, also known as “The Desert Rats,” is en route to Poland to take part in Steadfast Defender, NATO’s largest European exercise in 40 years.
Approximately 600 vehicles, including armoured vehicles, Land Rovers, and engineers’ tractors, were loaded into MV Anvil Point, a 23,000-tonne cargo vessel, near Southampton on Tuesday.
Some 1,500 service personnel will fly out to join the NATO exercises, the largest to take place since the Cold War.
Maj. Simon Robertson of 17 Port and Maritime Regiment said: “It’s very much down to us to ensure that we get the vehicles where they need to be and the people in order [so] they can move on to conduct the exercise.
“It’s a busy one, it’s got a number of moving parts and it’s over a four, five month period for us, but actually for the regiment itself we do this day in day out.
A Display of NATO Unity
NATO announced its intention to conduct Steadfast Defender last month, calling it “a significant display of military prowess” which allows the defence union to showcase “transatlantic unity, strength, and determination in the face of evolving security challenges.”
Starting at the end of January and ending May 31, approximately 90,000 troops from all 31 NATO allies and partner Sweden will be engaged in multi-domain exercises across land, air, sea, cyber, and space operations.
Events will take place in Finland, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and the UK. More than 20,000 UK military personnel are expected to take part in exercises across northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Exercises of this scale are planned years in advance and use fictitious scenarios to test and refine defence plans.
The Desert Rats’ departure comes as Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, which is leading the military maritime mission of 40 ally vessels, set sail on Monday for a location near Norway.
Commodore James Blackmore, commander of the UK Carrier Strike Group leading the HMS Prince of Wales, said on Monday: “The UK has an unwavering commitment to NATO and collective deterrence and defence of the Euro-Atlantic region.
Warning Over UK’s Readiness to Engage in War
The ship’s departure from Portsmouth was supposed to take place on Sunday, but remained in dock, prompting security minister Tom Tugenhat to say, “It isn’t acceptable that we have such expensive and important items of kit sitting in dock when they should be out defending our interests abroad.”The Ministry of Defence did not give a reason for the last-minute failure to sail.
Earlier this month the House of Commons Defence Committee warned that the UK’s ability to engage in a war was marred by the armed forces’ recruitment crisis and stockpile shortage.
The “hollowing out” of the military since 2010 had undermined the country’s warfighting resilience, the committee’s inquiry heard, warning that the armed forces would exhaust their capabilities “after the first couple of months of the engagement” in a peer-on-peer war.
