Spears of Victory 2022
Spears of Victory 22 is a multi-national air training exercise which is held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The exercise started on 13 February 2022 and lasted for ten days.
It is the first training exercise of its kind in the Kingdom under the command of the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) and resembles most as a smaller version of complex mission excercises as Red Flag (USA) and Anatolian Eagle in (Turkey).
The purpose of this training is to raise the combat efficiency of the participants, especially the RSAF, and to train on command and control missions for large combat formations with different missions simultaneously.
The scenario contained a high number of offensive and defensive complex training flights with presence of electronic warfare and air defence systems wupplemented with the presence of aggressor fighter aicraft to simulate enemies capabilities.
Spears of Victory 2022 was held in the recently opened Air Warfare Centre (AWC) at King Abdulaziz Air Base located on the Gulf coast in the Eastern Region with more than 300 km training area available in the direct neighbourhood. In December 2018, the US Air Force awarded a USD104 million contract to design and build the new facilities. The AWC consists of 31,400 m2 of new buildings including three new aircraft maintenance hangars and a squadron operations facility, as well as 167,000 m2 of new paving and 24 aircraft sunshades.
The KSA Ministry of Defence released some videos (video 1, video 2) of the exercise via their Twitter account.
Participating units:
Other assets such as helicopters from different squadrons and navy frigates also participated in this exercise. Details on these units are not known.
Photos via KSA MoD