In Kenya’s Laikipia plateau hundreds of British soldiers deployed, a recent night fording a river, marching across wadis and over escarpments before attacking a army training camp which was acted like the one.
This is varied ways British soldiers learn to fight, in regular six-week training sessions culminating in a simulated assault, this time involving 1,000 troops.
“This is among the most demanding training that we do,” said Brigadier Nick Perry, commander of Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade, who was in Kenya with three companies of Gurkhas.
In recent years, infantry units were dispatched to Kenya for their final training before being deployed to Afghanistan and, for the “rapid reaction force” 16 Air Assault, being always in a mode of defend attack which is a specialty.
“I need soldiers to be ready to go on operations at very short notice,” said Perry.
“Kenya allows large-scale exercises so the whole battle group — the infantry, the artillery, the engineers, the intelligence and surveillance assets — can be tested alongside each other.”
They also cooperated alongside the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF), of which a 150-strong members swept across a hillside filled with acacia and euphorbia trees in one of the final moments of the recent training exercise.
“Increasingly, operations around the world are multinational. It’s pretty rare now to find a single nation at conflict, and as Britain we’re not in that game.”
Britain hasn’t gone to war alone since 1982 when it fought a two-month battle with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. British troops are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of multinational forces and as peacekeepers in South Sudan and Somalia regimes.
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