by Lieutenant P D E Razzall
Officer Commanding Number Two Platoon
The Prince of Wales’s Company, 1st Battalion Welsh Guards
Editor’s note – the author is a trained Arabic linguist.
Two days after the conclusion of my Battalion’s Exercise WESSEX STORM I deployed to Oman as a translator on Exercise JEBEL STORM, a five week battle camp run by 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment (2 R ANGLIAN) in the Jebel al-Akhdar (“Green Mountain”). The area consists of a mountain chain roughly habitable up to 2000 metres above sea level, and was the scene of a sporadic insurgency in the 1950s put down with the help of the SAS.
Each year, the British Army runs a joint exercise with the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces (SAF) in order to deepen the already strong links between the two militaries. Locations for the exercise have varied, previously having been run in the southern deserts. 2017 was the first year that the Jebel al-Akhdar has been used. The host battalion was the Omani Parachute Regiment, whom we shared a camp with on the Sayq Plateau at an elevation of 1900 metres. Driving from the capital, Muscat, to the Sayq plateau was an interesting experience, with vertiginous mountain roads providing stunning views towards the coast and the interior.
Gun drills on the edge of a 500m precipice.
Exercise JEBEL STORM was intended to be a series of joint battle lessons sharing knowledge between the British Army and the Omanis, before transitioning to a shared exercise with fully integrated companies and command structures. Sadly, logistical nightmares put paid to any hope of a shared exercise. The supply system collapsed, meaning that insufficient ammunition, radio batteries, gun oil, or indeed sun cream and foot powder arrived in the Jebel al-Akhdar to enable training.
As a translator however, there was opportunity in this misfortune: lack of materiel meant that I was more often required to spend time helping to train the Omanis, who did enjoy enough ammunition to train. The effort of learning a whole new Arabic vocabulary which was not only Omani but also military was tiring but fantastically rewarding. The naming of parts, the intricacies of platoon tactics, the nomenclature of different ranks and the different slang's spoken by soldiers, who came from areas ranging from Balochistan to Zanzibar, all contributed to a rapid improvement in the level of my spoken Arabic. Simply being forced to speak for 6 hours a day allowed a new fluency to develop.
Luckily acquiring this vocabulary was immeasurably helped by the strong similarities between the Oman and British armies. Orders delivered by Omanis are written in a very similar framework to the format in the All Arms Tactical Aide Memoire and doctrinally and tactically the Omanis and British are synced. As we continued with what had transformed from an exercise to a Short Term Training Team, there was a real development in the capabilities of the Omanis.
Before talking about their development however, it is worth emphasizing the strong training start state for the Omanis. Their marksmanship and use of the ground (perhaps due to the lifestyle and roots of some of the soldiers in Bedu families or in mountain dwelling farming families) far surpassed that of the average British soldier. Whilst unfit compared to British soldiers, they were far more robust: some deployed into the mountains for a four day exercise with just a blanket and a kilogram of dates. They also display subtle deviations from the tactical British model, using integral guides to help manoeuvre the platoon as well as devolving navigation to the most junior soldiers. In the mountains, donkeys are used to carry loads ranging up to around 50kg, and they are well treated, rested and rotated by their drivers.
At platoon command level, the SAF displayed a tactical awareness roughly equal to British infantry platoon commanders. The greatest difficulties they had were at section commander level, where the training they receive is not broadly equivalent to the Section Commanders’ Battle Course. Accordingly, a large amount of training was given to section commanders and, in particular, to casualty evacuation (casevac) procedures. Whilst there were many elements of section command that the Omanis knew as a drill, such as breaking down the ground, there were as a distinct lack of aggression and the vital killer instinct. 2 R ANGLIAN section commanders therefore delivered a section attack package, including urban ops and casevac) serials.
The blank section of the exercise culminated with an integrated company attack commanded by Major Hilal, the Omani company commander. As a translator, I was used to relay Omani hasty orders to the British platoon commanders and respond with their situation reports. This attack was watched by the Chief of the Omani Army, who was happy to see a large degree of interoperability and flexibility between the two nationalities.
The blank exercise was followed by a short range package in the desert, where the local guides showed us the many varieties of camel, wild honeycomb and edible lizards. On completion of ranges, we were lucky enough to be able to spend one day’s rest and recuperation in Muscat, seeing a different side to Oman.