Ships, aircraft and troops from more than a dozen nations will soon be gathering to take part in Northern Light 03, a major NATO exercise in the Irish Sea off the west coast of Scotland from September 15-26.

Operating together as an integrated force will be 50 ships and submarines, 15 fighter aircraft, numerous military helicopters and around 800 amphibious and land troops provided by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the USA, and by partner nations Sweden and Ukraine.

The exercise will be a chance to demonstrate some of the maritime and amphibious capabilities of the new NATO Response Force, and will be the first of several similar combined and joint operations as this builds up to full operational capability in October 2004.

The creation of flexible, expeditionary and rapidly-deployable sea, land and air forces is the cornerstone of the new NATO ‘transformation’, and the build-up of the NATO Response Force is ahead of schedule, with an initial grouping due to come into operation in October.

Northern Light will test the operational capability of the participating forces and Headquarters in responding to a crisis.

The Maritime Component Commander will demonstrate the activation of a Higher Readiness Force Maritime HQ in aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, and amphibious and land components will conduct an amphibious landing in Luce Bay, near Stranraer, early in the morning of September 20.

In the continuing drive to improve military capability, Northern Light will also be the test bed for assessing and evaluating a number of new experimental projects and concepts. These will include:
• An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for mine countermeasures
• A nuclear, biological and chemical response team and mobile laboratory
• Multinational logistics procedures
• Force protection measures
• A common operating decision system

The exercise will be based on a fictitious scenario depicting an armed insurgency in a non-NATO country threatening the border security interests of its neighbours.

Based on a formal mandate by the United Nations, NATO is asked to help restore stability to the country and enforce an arms embargo by deploying a joint task force with an amphibious capability.

Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, in his NATO capacity as Commander-in-Chief East Atlantic, will lead the NATO force against the opposing forces, led by Vice Admiral Merico Santos of the Portuguese Navy, who is NATO’s Commander-in-Chief South Atlantic.

At the end of the exercise, NATO’s Mine Countermeasures Force Northern Europe (MCMFORNORTH), a multi-national force of eight minehunters and minesweepers, will visit Liverpool from September 26-28.

MCMFORNORTH provides a specialist mine countermeasures capability in the Baltic, Northern Europe and the North Sea, and is one of NATO’s four highly-mobile maritime Immediate Reaction Forces.

The visit has been timed to coincide with the end of the round-the-world Clipper Race and the celebrations due to take place in Liverpool that weekend, and the NATO minehunters and minesweepers will join ten other warships from seven different nations.

The NATO MCM force will consist of HDMS Laxen and Lindormen (Denmark), FGS Kulmbach (Germany), HNLMS Schiedam (Netherlands), HNOMS Oksøy (Norway), ORP Flaming (Poland), BNS Aster (Belgium) and HMS Inverness (UK).

Two of the vessels, the Force Flagship HDMS Lindormen and HMS Inverness, will be berthed in Albert Dock over the weekend, and HMS Inverness will be open to visitors.

After the visit, the Force will sail for the Baltic to take part in combined operations with the Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian Navies as part of the NATO enlargement plan.