Troops face frozen challenge on Exercise Winter Camp
Troops face frozen challenge on Exercise Winter Camp.
From the top of a Challenger 2 tank as an icy wind howled around Tapa military camp in Estonia, the Commanding Officer of the Kings Royal Hussars thanked his troops.
Lieutenant Colonel Will Hodgkinson addressed the massed ranks of British, Danish, Estonian and French troops gathered on the military bases runway with Challenger 2 and Leopard tanks lined up in perfect formation.
Soldiers from the NATO allies had just finished a demanding two week exercise,Winter Camp, which tested troops to the limit in the snowbound, frozen forests that make up the Tapa landscape.
Blank firing exercises took place throughout the day and night as soldiers practised and perfected their skills on the simulated battlefield in the extreme weather conditions.
After Russias illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO adopted a series of measures designed both to reassure those allies who border Russia like Estonia and to deter any potential Russian military aggression against NATO allies.
In 2016 NATO agreed to set up an enhanced Forward Presence in Poland and the three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This takes the form of a multinational battlegroup in each country.
The UK leads the battlegroup in Estonia.Since 2017 the UK has deployed an armoured battlegroup equipped with Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior infantry fighting vehicles, numbering around 800 to 900 personnel, on rotating six month tours. The UK deployment is based in Tapa and is known as Operation Cabrit.
Colonel Dai Bevan, Operation Cabrit Commander, said,
Exercise Winter Camp has been necessarily demanding and complex. It is the cementing of the eFP Battlegroups cold weather credentials.It is what they have been building up to since their arrival in Estonia in September.
Reports on the Russian performance in Ukraine have highlighted complexity of combined arms operations and the need to invest in combined arms competence.
Furthermore, the impact of winter on operations is profound mobility is reduced and basic administration and maintenance in the field takes skill, effort and time.
Denmark and France also contribute to the battlegroup, which is integrated with the Estonian 1st Infantry Brigade.
UK Armed Forces have a leading role in NATOs eFP in the Baltic countries, enhancing security, reassuring our allies and deterring our enemies.