Page 50 - QDG Vol. 9 No. 2 CREST

48 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards
Ex Warfighter
Fort Hood, Texas, USA
March and April saw the deployment to Texas of 3 of the QDG’s finest (and most available) soldiers and officers to take part in the USA-hosted, multinational Corps-level planning exercise, Exercise Warfighter. Warfighter is as large in scale as it is impressive in ambition - 3 different divisions from the USA, the UK and France come together to test their interoperability at divisional level in a fluid and ever changing campaign. Utilising the CAT/CAST system the allies had to work together to combat an “anony- mous foreign opponent” whose capital, unsurprisingly, looked very similar to Moscow...
Captain Hugo Martel (now sadly resigned to 1 UK Civ Div), Lt Upward and Tpr Sheal flew out to Fort Texas in early March as part of 7th Infantry Brigade and HQ East. 7X had been specially chosen to prove the concept of fitting a British light brigade in amongst an American heavy armour division, something that brought with it a number of perks and challenges in equal measure. The American 1st Division, for starters, has in its arsenal more artillery and helicop- ters than the combined British Armed Forces which substantially increased the resources usually available to British
Taking a walk on the wild side