Tuesday 25 June 2013

Exercise Askari Thunder

To tide you over, while I finish up work on my next piece, I thought I'd share some videos from British Forces News on Exercise Askari Thunder, taking place in Kenya. It appears they're doing a series of videos and there may yet be more to come. 

Askari Thunder is a complex infantry training exercise, which is also bringing together elements such as artillery support and observation from UAV's. The training area provided for the forces is large, varied, and combined with the intense heat it provides a challenge unlike anything available in the UK.

One of the reasons I take such an interest in things like this is because my worry is that as budgets fall, training will suffer. The withdrawl of British Forces from Germany may save money, but it's also costing the British armed forces two significant training areas. 

History has taught us that in warfare - all things being equal (or near equal) - the better trained force wins. As the armed forces shrink, the need to maintain the edge in quality becomes more and more paramount. Large exercises like Askari Thunder are vital to the British army as it moves forward into the "post-Afghanistan" era, where the next deployment for the troops involved could be anything from another peace keeping mission to a full scale battle group deployment as part of a wider force in a conventional campaign.




8 comments:

  1. " full scale battle group deployment"

    Perhaps the saddest thing I've read in a very long time.

    A battle group described as full scale.

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    1. How can a battalion of infantry deploy as anything larger than a battle group? Good use of the selective quoting there as well, missing off the "as part of a wider force" that came right after it.

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  2. Can I just say that those chaps on the videos seem to be having enormous fun, and they are in the warm. In my day all we got, unless your were very lucky, was Northern Ireland and Germany, both, for the most part, cold and/or wet. Makes me wish I was forty years younger.

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    1. Forty odd degree heat, not sure I'd want any part of that! I personally seem to function best somewhere between 10 and 17, so I think I've ended up in the right place in the life lottery!

      All good challenges for the army though. High heat in Kenya. Bollock arse cold in Germany and Canada. Perpetual rain in the UK...

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    2. Mr. Chris,

      Just reading the RUSI paper linked to over on TD's site:

      http://www.rusi.org/publications/newsbrief/ref:A51C8322FDA604/#.Uc1sUtKR_QB

      It makes the point that very soon the army will be wholly based in the UK with, until the next war, just some small contingents going overseas for Cyrus & Falklands garrisons and the odd training mission. I wonder what impact that is going to have on recruiting. "Join the army and see Catterick, Aldershot and Colchester" will not perhaps much have much appeal to the adventurous youngsters. Even Northern Ireland and Germany were better than that.

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    3. Not convinced myself by a lot of that RUSI stuff. Seems to have a lot of clever words and talk about the future, but without really nailing down any of the problems in detail or offering suggestions of how to fix them. Aside from the suggestion about setting up a dedicated history branch. The paper about foreign cultures seems like an absurd, knee jerk reaction to the problem of a lack of cultural knowledge among officers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. We already have a body that does that sort of thing, it's called the Foreign and Commonwealth office.

      And what, prey tell, is wrong with Colchester ;) (... a lot).

      My understanding is that even though the permenant garrisons will mostly be in the UK, the armed forces will still do training across the globe; BATUS, Kenya, Brunei etc.

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  3. To be sure the RUSI paper comes across as some special pleading from some retired officers that their pensions should be topped up for writing A level bollocks papers about world affairs. Nothing new there, that is what the RUSI is for. However that is beside the point I was trying to make.

    The army might send a battalion (plus RAC hangers-on etc.) or two per year to Canada or Kenya, or maybe Brunei, for a few weeks training each year, but the vast majority of the army is going nowhere more interesting than UK training ranges, repeatedly. The UK army is going to be almost exclusively in the UK for the first time in centuries. Will that hit recruitment? I think it will and it will hit hardest in the infantry - the "corps" will do better at least those that can offer a youngster a trade or qualifications that are useful in civvy street.

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    1. How many of the youngsters know what they're getting in to when they sign up though? It might hit retention, but recruitment will probably be ok. Show some nice brochures of people walking through rivers "tactically" in Brunei and guys going skiing in Germany (the army is planning, as far as I know, to still use much of the adventurous training network built up in Germany) and they'll be fine.

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