MEDICINE HAT, Alberta, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- British troops have been training in the rugged spaces of Alberta, Canada, at a refurbished facility designed to ready units for harsh Afghanistan conditions.
The British Army Training Unit Suffield near Medicine Hat in Alberta recently was upgraded with new training facilities to prepare British troops for the combat environment in Afghanistan and also in Iraq, the British Ministry of Defense reported.
The refurbished BATUS prairie facility has a new live-fire area replicating an Afghan village and an underground tunnel complex to test close-quarter combat, among other upgrades that coincide with the volatile operational theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"There are operational realities that we face in the world, and we are installing new infrastructure to try and pull those realities onto the block," Col. Ben Edwards, BATUS commander, said in a statement.
"The training is absolutely invaluable to contemporary operations. You don't need to have the Taliban attacking you constantly, because there are a hundred other things that can go wrong, whether it's people getting lost or getting stuck."
