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Huge Arctic exercise proves perfect workout for Royal Navy’s senior battlestaff ahead of NATO mission
23 March 2026
A specialist Royal Navy team has used the largest military exercise in the Arctic to prepare itself for NATO’s most important mission at sea.
The staff of the Commander UK Strike Force – 116 personnel normally based on Whale Island in Portsmouth – are helping to direct the biannual Arctic exercises designed to safeguard Europe’s northern flank from any Russian aggression.
Warships, aircraft, helicopters, drones, armour and 25,000 personnel (11,800 on the ground, the remainder in naval and air forces) from 14 nations are committed to Cold Response, which has been focused in northern Norway since the beginning of the month – but also extended to Sweden and Finland.
While it has been running, forging a powerful allied force capable of defending a region whose climate is as challenging as its terrain, a second exercise has been running concurrently to test the British staff.
For three weeks they’ve swapped Portsmouth for Haakonsvern Naval Base, five miles from Bergen, from where they took charge of warships from the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Turkey and the UK’s own HMS St Albans, plus naval air power.
In July, the UK is due to take on responsibility for command of NATO’s premier naval force: the Allied Reaction Force (Maritime).
The international task group is formed quickly to respond to a specific emergency or crisis, and comprises as many or few vessels/aircraft/personnel as the mission requires.
In Norway, that group was already at the disposal of the staff – almost all Royal Navy personnel, plus exchange officers from Turkey, Germany and France, and half a dozen NATO liaison officers – in the fjords and in the Norwegian Sea.
Then it was a test of the many facets of command the staff are likely to face for real when in charge of a large, three-dimensional, modern, multi-national naval force: joint manoeuvres, air–sea coordination, logistics, and real time decision-making.
“NATO is vigilant to threats in all areas, across all domains. What we are proving here is that the UK stands ready to defend and deter against aggression on NATO’s northern flank,” said Rear Admiral Mark Anderson, Commander UK Strike Force,
The staff exercise in Norway – known as Dynamic Mariner – builds on a table-top/planning workout held in Portsmouth just before Christmas.