Is a combined arms fighting troops exercise in the United Kingdom that shows the British Public what it means to be At War. In the 1980s, the British Army of the Rhine practised their operating procedures with a deployment of 1st British Corps every autumn, after the farmers had collected their harvest. If it was particularly wet, our 60 ton battle tanks were restricted to roads and tracks. This continued in the UK until the Millennium. For example, in 1994, I organised a brigade FTX that took in the East Midlands, Cumbria, Northumberland and Scotland with live firing at Otterburn and Warcop and gruelling combat training in Kielder Forest.
The organisation of a Corps FTX is probably beyond our current crop of staff officers; for example it takes deep knowledge to co-ordinate a move of 3,000 vehicles without coming to a complete standstill and providing the enemy air force with a sitting-duck target. However, it would not be beyond their capability to link the major training areas of Salisbury Plain, Brecon, Dartmoor, and Otterburn with tanks. artillery and infantry moving between each of them.
The benefits would be two-fold. Firstly, we would relearn many military lessons that have been forgotten in the past 25 years. Second, the public would actually see the armed forces do something real at home not just in some far-away place. For too long, the military has been sidelined in the shadows compared with the American armed forces and those on the front line with Russia.
Exercise Lionheart in Germany
Rupert Wieloch 