Two naval ships from CFB Esquimalt were seen in the waters off Airforce Beach near Comox Wednesday morning and a third was in the area as Canadian Navy and Army Reservists took part in Exercise Cougar Gauntlet.
“We haven’t done this in many years and what we’re doing is a littoral operation which is an operation close to shore, basically doing a landing from the ship onto the shore,” said Col. Scott Raesler of the 39 Brigade Group.
320 army soldiers from B.C. and Alberta, along with 450 navy sailors from as far as Newfoundland are taking part in the weeklong exercise.
On Wednesday, they came ashore in a dozen Combat Engineer and Assault Pioneer boats.
“So they’re going to be conducting a raid on a series of objectives on the bluff in behind us,” said Raesler. “The boats are going to come in, they’re going to break off into two different objectives, they’ll assault those objectives, secure them, they’ll destroy material that is on the objectives, they’ll move back to their boats and they’ll basically withdraw back out to sea.”
“It’s the kind of skills development that we will use almost every day whether we’re deployed overseas or domestically just in regular activities,” added Commander Bryan Price, Officer in Tactical Command, Naval Reserves.
The Army-Navy exercise comes at a time when war rages on in Ukraine and while Exercise Cougar Gauntlet was in the planning stages well before Russia invaded Ukraine, that conflict serves as a backdrop during the exercise.
“So it’s always in the back of our minds and this just gives a bit more of a reality check to that so that we know these skills that we develop and train can be used if necessary,” said Price.
“The most recent and tragic invasion of Ukraine shows us here that littoral operations are obviously a combined part of warfare and this is something we need to be training for as well,” added Raesler.
“The fact that it is really kind of overshadowing our training today just gives greater impetus as to why we are doing this type of combine arms training.”
The Exercise Cougar Gauntlet ends on Friday.
Dean Stoltz
