Background
As the British Army's rapid response formation, 16 Air Assault Brigade has served in the vanguard of all the Army's recent operational deployments to Sierra Leone, Macedonia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and is the largest brigade in the British Army with 8,000 personnel. Its structure makes it a highly flexible and capable unit. It comprises a Formation Reconnaissance Squadron, an artillery regiment with an attached air defence battery, an engineer regiment, two parachute infantry battalions and two air assault infantry battalions, three aviation regiments, logistics, medical and mechanical engineering regiments or battalions and the Pathfinder group.
The brigade HQ is based in Colchester Garrison and is under the operational command of the tri-service Joint Helicopter Command (JHC) and is assigned to the British-led Allied Rapid Reaction Corps of NATO as Corps Troops. For administrative purposes, it is under the control of 5th Division, now Support Command.
The brigade is based in Colchester, Essex and the Brigade Headquarters has personnel from both the British Army and the Royal Air Force assigned, enabling it to carry out Air and Land operations.
Due to the brigade's mobile role it is lightly armed and equipped. The brigade's land equipment includes Scimitars, WMIK Land Rovers, Supacats, towed L118 105 mm light guns, Javelin anti-tank and lightweight Starstreak air-defence missile launchers. The aviation element of the brigade consists of three attack regiments equipped with WAH-64 Apache and Lynx helicopters from the Army Air Corps, and Chinook, Merlin and Puma support helicopters from the RAF. The brigade is also supported by the RAF's Hercules transport aircraft fleet.
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