CFB SUFFIELD — May marks the beginning of training for soldiers at CFB Suffield and BATUS.
Member of the British Infantry began their first exercise, Prairie Storm 1, earlier this month.
“There’s a lot to take in for a young soldier and he needs to just get past the living and get on to the fighting,” said Commander Colonel Marcus Evans.
Tanks were firing off at the approaching enemy as Evans explained the exercise.
It’s a sound the soldiers are used to.
“We’ve been out here for about 13 days,” Evans said. “We’re coming towards a combination of our combined arms live-fire training.
Prairie Storm 1 marks the first exercise of the year for BATUS.
“We’ve got tanks and armoured personnel carriers, scout vehicles, infantry men exercising across the prairie, using all sorts of live ammunition together,” Evans added. “[It’s] very complex, very dangerous, challenging. It’s the closest we think we can come to the replication of war.”
Major Alex Mills is able to watch every soldier move from inside ExCon, the exercise control facility, just outside of the training area.
“It’s getting them rehearsed and ready and trained and really being masters of their systems, of their platforms, of their vehicles,” Mills said. “But not only their own but then working in this, what we call, a combined armed setting, so tanks working with infantry, working with the artillery, working with engineers.”
“It’s a very austere environment for a young European soldier,” Evans added. “The wide open spaces have a variety of weather. We’ve got a variety of terrain here of deep coulees, some urban terrain, some hilltops as well as low grass land.”
The training area is roughly 2,700 square kilometres, larger than all of the British training grounds combined.
The size alone means new scenarios can be mapped out and brought to life.
“This is taking crews and soldiers and troops from UK brigades and formations, they come here for this training. It’s the only place the British army can do this sort of training,” Mills said.
Soldiers face a lot of pressures in training, similar to what they’d face in war. That includes the battle continuing long after sunset.
“We’re also trying to push this combination of arms at night, so we do more fighting at night and more fighting in the urban environment so that we can prepare our forces for the next conflict,” Evans said.
“We add extra things to the training to make it that way so, right now, this is day three of battalion level firing,” Mills said. “A lot of the guys out here now haven’t really had much sleep in the last two or three days. They’ve been working hard. We’ve been giving them missions to carry out and we’ve given them tasks to do and they’ve been working pretty much for the last two days flat out.
“We do ensure they’re getting sufficient rest to be safe in what they’re doing, but really we’re just trying to really put as much pressure on as we can in a realistic environment to best prepare them for what they may have to do if they go on operations after training here.”
Evans said roughly 6,000 soldiers will be brought in for training this year and said many could join NATO on the front lines.
