As you will have seen from our various posts, we have now completed our first exercise re-learning how to build and then work together as a moveable head office, or deployed headquarters. Our headquarters needs to be capable of commanding the maximum of a Corps, or approximately 60,000 people (more people than British Airways employ) on an operation anywhere.
The nearest comparison would be living and working daily at a camp site. At the basic level I need to remind myself how to do all the things I routinely do at home but whilst camping, which takes more energy and thought. I need to pack my bed and what I will wear, then organise my bedroom in a tent with 10 other people, without upsetting them!
We all need to get into a routine of doing the basic things like washing, shaving at the camp-site together. Then starting our daily commutes by walking to breakfast before getting into the office before 7am.
The next part of our progress from crawling to walking is concentrating on refreshing our basic soldiering skills, which we will do based in Imjin Barracks. This ensures that we are physically fit, able to shoot safely and straight, update our first-aid skills, remember how to read a map and refresh our ability to continue to do our jobs in a hostile chemical, biological or radiological environment, amongst other things.
These various demands not only to me, but the CEO, the board, all the other managers, the IT guys, the company restaurant, the people who provide the power, water and communications utilities and security people all supporting the company head office.
Of course, there is a purpose to all of this as we need to be fully prepared to deploy to an operation within days as part of the NRF, together with our multinational colleagues. We don’t know where yet, and if an operation happens we don’t know how long we would be away. Making sure we have thoroughly prepared ourselves both individually and as a team is called "readiness”.
As there is no certainty to where we will be going, we need to cover as many eventualities as reasonably possible, so we also need to educate ourselves as to the situation in the likely places we might be going.
We do this by conducting weekly intelligence briefings and crisis response planning. We also recently held a disaster relief study day with the United Nations, academics and other Non-Governmental Organisations. Operations these days are too complex for the military to accomplish themselves, so we rely upon civilian expertise in order to deliver a comprehensive approach. The civilian advisors also deploy with us and work in the same conditions.
We are not operating in a vacuum, but as part of a multinational corporation based in
Naples, whose priority is to ensure that all the environments (land, air, sea) are working together smoothly. They need to ensure that the "command and control” is properly integrated under their overall direction.
By doing what we do now, we ensure that the overall force arrives knowing why it is there and what it has to do. The force arrives in the right order by air and by ship at the right time, with the right equipment. If we don’t get it right first time, then it will not only cost a lot of money and cause major embarrassment, but could cost a lot of lives.
What of the soldiers we would command if we go somewhere? We only know who the first will be. They would be built around the British 16 Air Assault Brigade headquarters, with a British infantry battalion, a French infantry battalion and a Turkish infantry battalion, together with supporting artillery, engineers, armoured vehicles, helicopters and their supporting logistics. They constitute the land element of what is called the Immediate Response Force (IRF) provided by a total of 19 separate nations. Other forces would be drawn from the Response Forces Pool (RFP) and offered by nations to an operation through a system called ‘force generation’.
If you have any further questions about what we are doing, or want any further information about a particular aspect, just ask at our Facebook page.