British soldiers hold joint training exercise with Oman

British troops have taken part in desert war training as part of their four-month deployment to Oman.

The combined exercise involved British soldiers and the Royal Army of Oman and took place on the Ras Madrakah joint training area.

The exercise aimed to test troops’ ability to train and operate in arduous terrain, including desert plains, complex wadi systems and mountains. Troops also worked on soldiering in austere environments, working with partner forces and learning battle-winning tactics to protect the British public from future threats.

Battlegroup Commander Lt Col Ben Hawes 2nd Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment, is preparing his troops to assume command of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) in January 2024. He said: "Since March last year, the focus of our training has been to ensure that we are ready to fight against a peer enemy force. This exercise is the UK ensuring that its spearhead battlegroup is in exactly the right place to go out the door.

"My troops have been absolutely put through their paces. Everything that our peer enemies could do to us, has been done to us. I’ve operated with every single one of my radio frequencies jammed, I’ve operated with no GPS, I’ve operated at night for long periods of time; we’ve done training serial after training serial.

"This is about our ability to operate and sustain an operation against an enemy that has the same, or maybe even greater capabilities than we do."

Image: Aquintero82, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons