Multinational force gathers in UK for Exercise Joint Warrior

Europe’s largest mil­i­tary exer­cise has got under­way as a multi­na­tion­al ensem­ble of sea, air and land forces bat­tle it out around the coast of the Unit­ed King­dom as part of Exer­cise Joint War­rior.

HMS Led­bury arrives in Faslane for Exer­cise Joint War­rior Source: Senior Air­craft­man Dick­in­son, Min­istry of Defence, UK Click to enlarge

Over the next two weeks 8,000 ser­vice­men and women will take part in the exer­cise which involves per­son­nel from 14 nations, thir­ty ships, three sub­marines, sev­en heli­copter units, 14 land-based air units and 11 sep­a­rate ground forces. 

Exer­cise Joint War­rior is a UK-wide, tri-Ser­vice exer­cise con­duct­ed in spring and autumn each year. 

The exer­cise sce­nario involves three sov­er­eign nations, dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry and ter­ror­ist move­ments. Com­menc­ing with a peri­od of force inte­gra­tion train­ing the exer­cise will devel­op over two weeks, through a peri­od of ten­sion, into sim­u­lat­ed war-fight­ing and open hostilities. 

In addi­tion to the UK the oth­er coun­tries tak­ing part are the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, Italy, France, Esto­nia, Spain, Poland, Bel­gium, Turkey, the Nether­lands, Nor­way, Swe­den and Denmark. 

HMS Ark Roy­al sailed into Faslane on Fri­day 1 Octo­ber 2010 to take part in the exer­cise and the naval base will play host to 15 more ships, mean­ing that Faslane and Glasgow’s King George V Dock will have 28 ships tied up between them. 

Oth­er UK-wide des­ti­na­tions for the ‘play­ers’ are Liv­er­pool, Loch Striv­en, Camp­bel­town, Lei­th, RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Kin­loss, RAF Marham, RAF Wadding­ton, RAF Lak­en­heath and RAF Leeming. 

The fly­ing, of course, will cov­er large parts of the coun­try and peo­ple are being warned not to be alarmed if they see unusu­al mil­i­tary activity. 

To meet the many and var­ied train­ing needs of the par­tic­i­pants Joint War­rior facil­i­tates a very broad range of cri­sis and con­flict sce­nar­ios includ­ing counter-insur­gency, state-spon­sored ter­ror­ism, counter-nar­cotics and state-on-state con­flict, all of which help train Joint War­rior par­tic­i­pants across the air, mar­itime and land envi­ron­ments in the many and var­ied skills that are required of today’s mod­ern Armed Forces. 

It should be not­ed that the Min­istry of Defence has decreed that envi­ron­men­tal con­sid­er­a­tions will always be con­sid­ered when plan­ning exer­cis­es to meet train­ing objec­tives; this direc­tion remains a pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion through­out exer­cise plan­ning and execution. 

Press release
Min­istry of Defence, UK 

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