Project HANNIBAL

Project HANNIBAL – Overview

Project HANNIBAL is the provision of a capability to support the design, delivery and evaluation of Collective Training events delivered in the constructive environment to the Army’s deployable formation headquarters. This training will achieve and demonstrate usable readiness as well as act as an engine for change. Most important, the HANNIBAL ethos is to support the Army in their determination to learn to win. The capability consists of:

A world class Enemy and Adversary (OPFOR) that presents a complex hybrid threat, capable of operating unconstrained across the spectrum of conflict. It includes; regular forces up to a peer plus enemy, irregular forces, militias and guerrillas, proxies (including private military companies), criminals and state sponsored activity, and information manoeuvre in a range of Decisive Action Training Environments (principally Eastern Europe and East Africa) that challenges the training audience and contributes to learning process. Trained systems operators will fight the tactical plans in the synthetic training tool. HANNIBAL is also responsible for the content and delivery of the Threat Tactics Course to enable OPFOR activity in both Constructive and Live environments. Audiences and Actors (White Cell) able to deliver realistic and coherent injects and role players at the appropriate level in response to tactical action throughout the training event, and which contribute to the cognitive frictions of modern operations and warfare.

An Exercise Control (EXCON) that provides a realistic contemporary environment, where scenarios and events are underpinned by expert academic theory, practitioners’ recent experience and real world event data. HANNIBAL designs and delivers a relevant, coherent and dynamic learning event where it controls the levers that test the training audience to the point of failure and where those effects are measured, recorded and promulgated to support In/After Action Reviews, the wider Lessons process and Force Development.

Senior Mentors, with command experience and who will know how to enrich the learning experience for commanders and their staff.

Hannibal’s EXCON staff will assist the LWC’s Command and Staff Tactical Training Group (CSTTG) in the delivery of realistic, coherent exercises that challenge the training audience. Their flexibility and innovation will ensure the event achieves the right tempo to deliver a rich learning event. HANNIBAL EXCON, OPFOR and White Cell form a single, coherent training capability. OPFOR has the key role of enabling the training audience to learn in training in order to succeed on operations; achieved by adopting novel approaches, high tempo planning and execution and the exploitation of the British Army’s equipment and procedural weaknesses.

To replicate the complex human and information context of contemporary conflict, HANNIBAL’s White Cell will replicate the cognitive friction experienced on operations by commanders and staff. EXCON will operate a battle rhythm that brings White Cell and OPFOR together for coordinated, dynamic activity in line with exercise aims and objectives.

Military mentoring is a personality-dependent art, not a template science. HANNIBAL will offer a range of options, giving Commanders’ choice. Our mentor pool will be targeted and current and we will develop their mentoring skills for both commanders and the key staff. Project Hannibal’s proven ‘Senior Mentor Handbook’ serves as a handrail for delivery.

HANNIBAL provides a capability designed, maintained and managed to challenge the training audience and enhance learning. It will deliver a realistic, unconstrained threat that stimulates performance by seeking to replicate faithfully the frictions of contemporary operations, including the growing challenges of hybrid warfare. HANNIBAL is about supporting Army readiness activity, it is about ‘Learning to Win’.