The United Kingdom will keep armoured forces in Estonia for the foreseeable future, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed, with Permanent Secretary Jeremy Pocklington telling the Defence Committee that the Forward Land Forces deployment will continue as the UK and Estonia work together to deter and defeat threats drawing on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.
The confirmation was given in a letter dated 10 April responding to questions raised during a Defence Committee evidence session in March, with Pocklington stating that “the UK will keep armour in Estonia for the foreseeable future” and that the UK and Estonia “continue to work together to ensure the FLF can deter and defeat threats posed to Estonia through optimisation and lessons learned in Ukraine, whilst forming a credible part of NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative.”
The Forward Land Forces is the contribution to NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia, comprising an armoured battlegroup built around Challenger 2 tanks and Ajax armoured reconnaissance vehicles, and representing one of the UK’s most visible and politically significant NATO commitments given Estonia’s position on the alliance’s eastern flank and the direct land border it shares with Russia.
The letter also confirmed that the MoD manages all force commitments through a single centrally governed force-generation system at the Military Strategic Headquarters, differentiating between assigned forces, allocated forces and notional planning assumptions, and noting that in a small number of cases “we make conditional offers that forces could be made available to an ally or operation if certain circumstances arise”, with the FLF in Estonia among the forces solely assigned to that commitment rather than being subject to those conditional arrangements.
Recently on You-Tube I watched a retired senior British tank commander take the new CH3 on a test run around the Telford plant. In his opinion, the CH3 is a worthy replacement for CH2, which is encouraging. I don’t believe he is the type of chap to commend anything if it’s not up to the job.
I don’t doubt it, once we got over our 1930s dalliance with questionable design and doctrine choices everything since then has been a very sound design. I just hope we get more than the paltry number of active protection kits than is currently planned, it’s beyond belief with what ukraine had taught us that anyone would send any expensive and scarce armoured vehicles into the front line without them!
I wonder if the Top Gear Toyota Hilux would survive a drone strike?
LOL.
We are getting a whole fleet of “Toyboata’s” soon.
Need a Captain Sensible to take command.
How can it be built around C2 and Ajax vehicles if they not yet fixed, *please one of the clever people on here explain that to me, what tube Arty have they got and do they have MLRS, if so its MLRS that can not fire Guided Rockets as we gave all of them to Ukraine and the only 2 up graded A2 MLRS are at the RSA.
BAOR returns….well sort of 🙂