In pictures: British troops lead Nato allies on the road to Vilnius and beyond during Op Aliwal Surge

British troops led a multifaceted exercise involving soldiers from across Nato's enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) Battle Group Poland.

Operation Aliwal Surge was a short-notice readiness exercise designed to test the interoperability and innovation of the participating military units.

Task Force Lancer (TF Lancer), a multinational reconnaissance group made up of around 50 people and 20 vehicles, was tasked with the mission of conducting a tactical road march, scouting a route of more than 1,100km between North Poland and Tallinn for follow-on forces and linking up with friendly forces (Nato) throughout the Joint Operations Area (JOA).

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During the shaping phase of Op Aliwal Surge, the aim was to use Nato to understand whether processes are in place to cut through the bureaucracy usually associated with conducting cross-border, multinational, military activity at short notice.

By using the Nato Battle Groups and Nato Force Integration Units (NFIUs), planners have shown that it is possible to organise this scale of activity across the B3P in three weeks – on paper at least.

TF Lancer turned that theory into practice by travelling through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, showing that it is possible to rapidly reinforce neighbouring partners.

Exercise planner SSgt James Bowers said: "Initially, I thought Op Aliwal Surge was ambitious for the timeframe allotted.

"There are still improvements to make before I would consider this type of exercise easy.

"There has been a lot of paperwork involved and some people and processes have been quite inflexible but once we explained what it was that we were trying to do and why, doors seemed to open."

With TF Lancer in the Baltics, there was concern that this could be seen as the UK decreasing its commitment to the Battle Group in Poland.

As a result, the majority of Aliwal Troop – the UK's contribution to the Nato Battle Group in Poland – conducted a large-scale exercise on public and private land with allies from Romania and Croatia.

Major Patrick Wolff, Executive Officer, Nato eFP Battle Group Poland, said: "Aliwal Surge and training events like it give the Battle Group an opportunity to assess our interoperability in each of the warfighting functions and across a huge portion of the Area of Operations (the Baltics and Poland).

"It's a great chance for our soldiers to work with allies in the Battle Group, and for Aliwal Troop to incorporate their reconnaissance operations into division-level operations."