The New Zealand Army is transforming how it fights, with drones, protected vehicles and closer ties to Australia and other allies. Waikato Herald reporter Tom Eley joined soldiers in the field at Waiōuru, discovering that “type two fun” is perhaps an acquired taste.
“Brace, brace, brace.”
It is not the sort of thing you want to hear after climbing into the back of an Army vehicle.
The instructions come quickly. Tuck your chin down. Brace yourself. If the vehicle rolls, this is what you do.
There are other instructions too. Protect your ears. Listen for “Fire, fire, fire”. Follow the crew’s directions if something goes wrong.
Then the door closes and the Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV) starts moving.
Inside, it is cramped, dark and surprisingly disorienting. There is little sense of where you are as the vehicle lurches over the terrain, the engine and gunfire filling the compartment with noise.
Then the doors open.
One moment you are squeezed inside a dark metal vehicle. The next, you are standing in the Waiōuru expanse, looking across brown-green ground broken by patches of tundra.
It takes a moment to get your bearings.
“If you’re feeling a bit disorientated, look out,” one of the soldiers tells us.
It is good advice.
Waiōuru is vast, exposed and unforgiving. The Army’s largest training area gives soldiers room to train far from the roads and towns most New Zealanders are used to.
Today, the quiet is about to disappear.
The first artillery round cracks across the training area.
LAVs move through the terrain as infantry advance, while engineers clear obstacles and artillery provides fire support.
Exercise Hill 60 involves about 480 troops within the Motorised Infantry Battle Group, with another 150 personnel serving as the opposing force in an earlier phase.
For those on the ground, the exercise has already meant long hours and bitter cold.
The previous week brought temperatures as low as -8C and about half a foot of snow. Soldiers completed a 12km dismounted movement at night in below-zero temperatures.
It was the experience one soldier described as “type two fun”.
“You put yourself through some adversity, and knowing that you and your teammates have done it together, that brings you together,” he said.
That sense of trust is central to what Hill 60 is testing.
Lieutenant Colonel Caleb Perry, the commanding officer of 1 RNZIR, said the Motorised Infantry Battle Group was the Army’s land combat output.
It brings together infantry, armour, artillery, signallers, medical support and logistics.
“No one really works in stove pipes in the Army,” Perry said.
“We all work in support of one another to achieve the objective at the end.”
Hill 60 follows Exercise Crete, held the previous month, where the Army identified lessons around integrating infantry and armour.
Those lessons were taken back to individual companies before being tested again at Waiōuru.
The exercise is also exposing soldiers to emerging technology, including experimental and first-person-view drones.
The battlefield is changing and the Army is changing with it.
Major General Rose King, the Chief of Army, said digitisation, improved protection and unmanned systems were among the areas shaping the force.
But she said the fundamentals remained.
“The effect may be the same, but will you deliver that through, I don’t know, a one-way effector, a drone or whatever?” King said.
“You still need to be able to deliver that effect.”
Perry does not believe new technology means the end of the infantryman or armoured vehicle.
“It’s just using these platforms and our people in a different way, in conjunction with drones.”
The change is also visible in the vehicles themselves.
The Bushmaster provides substantially greater protection than the older Pinzgauer vehicles, reflecting the Army’s focus on keeping soldiers alive in increasingly dangerous environments.
But the transformation is not happening in isolation.
King recently travelled to Australia to re-sign Plan Anzac with Australia’s new Chief of Army.
The agreement is intended to strengthen the two armies’ ability to plan, train and operate together, particularly in the Pacific.
“Our plans are more aligned than they have been, and we work hand in glove with a whole lot of things,” King said.
“That doesn’t change that we’re an independent country, so we still have our own sovereignty,” she said.
The goal is for the two forces to be increasingly interoperable and, where appropriate, interchangeable.
That relationship is already being tested beyond New Zealand.
Land Component Commander Brigadier Jason Dyhrberg said the Army had continued its operational commitments in South Sudan and the Middle East since the Covid-19 pandemic.
New Zealand has also trained Ukrainian recruits and squad leaders, first in the United Kingdom and now in Poland.
Its soldiers are increasingly being integrated into Australian and US formations during multinational exercises, while up to two infantry platoons rotate through the United Nations Command in South Korea each year.
Dyhrberg said New Zealand’s reputation was helping drive that demand.
“We are becoming a victim of our own success because we are in demand,” he said.
The Army may be small compared with its larger allies, but its soldiers and officers are regularly being asked to operate inside much larger formations.
That makes the ability to integrate with others an important capability.
For 1 RNZIR, Hill 60 also carries a much older history.
The exercise takes its name from the last offensive action fought by New Zealand troops during the Gallipoli campaign.
In August 1915, about 400 Canterbury and Otago mounted riflemen took part in an unsuccessful assault on the Ottoman-held position.
A second attack six days later also failed.
More than 200 New Zealanders were among the Allied casualties, and the fighting effectively destroyed the New Zealand Mounted Rifles as a fighting force.
Brigadier-General Andrew Russell described Hill 60 as an “abominable little hill”.
More than a century later, Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles is part of 1 RNZIR following its amalgamation last year. Its history stretches back to 1864.
Perry said the battalion names exercises after battles involving the units from which it draws its heritage.
“It’s just a bit of a hat tip to those that went before us,” he said.
The technology at Waiōuru is a long way from Gallipoli.
The horses are gone. LAVs move across the training area. Drones fly overhead. Artillery is coordinated across kilometres.
But some things have not changed.
Soldiers still have to trust the people beside them.
They still have to learn to operate under pressure.
And they still have to be ready when they are called upon.
Back at Waiōuru, the artillery fires again.
The sound rolls across the training area.
For all the talk of drones, digitisation, interoperability and the future of warfare, there are still soldiers standing in the Waiōuru dust, doing what soldiers have always been asked to do.
Learn their job.
Learn to trust the person beside them.
And be ready when someone says: “Brace, brace, brace.”
Tom Eley is a multimedia journalist at the Waikato Herald . Before he joined the Hamilton-based team, he worked for the Weekend Sun and Sunlive. He previously worked as a journalist at Black Press Media in Canada and won a fellowship with the Vancouver Sun .
