It has emerged that only one Joint Warrior exercise will take place this year due to concerns of overstretching forces as they undertake ‘other commitments’.
Joint Warrior is a UK-led multinational exercise that involves numerous warships, aircraft, marines and troops from allied nations around the world. The exercise traditionally takes place twice per year, the first in April and the second in October. Last Aprils exercise was the biggest in terms of scale in the exercise’s history with more than 50 ships, 70 aircraft and 13,000 personnel were involved.
The second of the two Joint Warrior exercises will not now take place as we understand that the armed forces are taking part in two other major exercises, leaving no capacity to commit appropriate forces to the second part of Joint Warrior.
According to a response to a Freedom of Information request:
It is understood that two Joint Warrior exercises are still expected to be held in 2019.
This comes not long after it was revealed that Oman will hold a joint military exercise with the UK later this year after an agreement was made between officials from both nations in London. The exercise is dubbed ‘Swift Sword’. Both nations previously held two similar military exercises, the last of which was conducted in the last quarter of 2001 and involved the largest single deployment of UK forces since the Gulf War.
Well there you are.
The military are not sitting idle in barracks but already committed to Saif Sareea 2 or whatever its called in Oman.
Nothing to see here and certainly nothing to moan about.
Moving on!
There’s quite a lot of work needed at Faslane too, which is where the operations centre is for JW, and some ships moor, this will give them a chance to get on with it uninterrupted later in the year – that’s if it’s scheduled for then (I’ve no idea).
Joint warrior literally starts now, and lasts for two weeks.
* Saif Sareea 3
Seems reasonable to me. We drop one of two Joint Warrior exercises because we are doing Swift Sword with Oman and also sending HMS Sutherland and HMS Argyle to Korea and Japan respectively. We don’t have enough hulls to do everything and reinforcing our relationships outside Europe is important.
I’m not sure of the schedule for PESCO, but if it was ready to go it could be a good time in autumn for it to set up its own equivalent of Joint Warrior with those countries signed up.
We will have HMS Albion, HMS Argyl and HMS Sutherland in the east. Next month we will be participating in Saif Sareea 3 in Oman with 6000 personnel and multiple RN assets. We will then be participating in Trident Juncture in Scandinavia with several thousand personnel including RN assets towards the end of the year.
So this year we are committed to three massive exercises in addition to dozens of smaller exercises, which are all in addition to all of our regular commitments and deployments.
Don’t forget the Red flag exercises we take part in and the one in Greece and we also had a big Norway exercise with the USMC recently… We are certainly active
wass poping i like tiyfoons and hms forth looks sike