Australian troops have joined their Singaporean counterparts in a bilateral amphibious exercise in the Shoalwater Bay Training Area (SWBTA) from 6-15 November.
Codenamed Exercise Trident, the event saw approximately 1,900 personnel from both countries involved.
The Australian troops were from 5 RAR, part of the Australian Army’s 1st Brigade, and they joined the Singapore Army’s 3rd Battalion, Singapore Guards, to carry out ship-to-shore training at Freshwater Bay - part of the SWBTA.
The troops launched from the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) Landing Ship Tanks RSS Endurance and Persistence using Singaporean landing craft as well the Republic of Singapore Air Force Boeing CH-47F Chinook heavy lift helicopters
Senior Lieutenant-Colonel Enriquez Michael Zachary, the lead of the Singaporean contingent at the exercise, told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper that Exercise Trident was an opportunity for the SAF to train in an amphibious exercise at a scale, complexity and level of realism that was difficult to replicate in Singapore.
“The vast training area here allows us to do contiguous manoeuvres, we can land troops on the beach and move inland and involve personnel in all four (SAF) services at the same time,” he said.
According to the Singapore Army’s Lieutenant-Colonel Mohamad Fahrul Saaid, a platoon of Australians were embedded with an SAF company of Guardsmen, while a platoon of Singaporeans moved the other way to join the Australians as part of the exercise.
This year’s Exercise Trident saw participants assault two separate objectives consecutively; a company-sized heliborne assault immediately inland from the beach at Freshwater Bay before linking up with a larger element coming in from the sea.
The forces then pushed on to the next objective, an urban target set in the newly expanded Urban Operations Training Facility (UOTF) in the SWBTA.
The expanded UOTF is part of a raft of improvements and upgrades made to the SWBTA to accommodate a larger number of Singaporean troops taking part in the annual Exercise Wallaby under the Australia-Singapore Military Training Initiative.
Other upgrades under the ASMTI include the construction of a new camp, Camp Tilpal, located approximately 80km north of Rockhampton and able to house up to 2,000 troops.
On the sidelines of the exercise, defence scientists from the Singapore Ministry of Defence Future Systems and Technology Directorate and DSO National Laboratories partnered the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) to conduct science and technology demonstrations.
The scientists deployed an integrated network of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles as well as a tactical 5G communications network at the urban operations training facility in SWBTA to support SAF and ADF’s urban operations for the first time.
The autonomous vehicles also provided 3D terrain mapping simultaneously at high speed, high bandwidth and low latency.
Secretary of the Department of Defence, Greg Moriarty said that the defence science and technology trials were part of the agreement reached between both countries during the 13th Meeting of the Singapore-Australia Joint Ministerial Committee in 2023, which also agreed to increase the complexity of bilateral exercises such as Exercise Trident.