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On the 24th-25th of March, myself and 9 other cadets attended the Military Skills Competition at Longmoor Military Training Camp in Hampshire to represent the contingent. 

The Military Skills Competition is a day of many fun and challenging military-based stands that help to develop leadership, teamwork, endurance, and military skills knowledge in a testing environment. 

We arrived on a Friday evening and picked up our ration packs that we would be using for the weekend, set up our tents and cooked and ate dinner. We then tried to do as much extra revision as possible to give ourselves the best chance for the following day of competitions.

We started Saturday off with a signals stand where we had to use semaphore flags, morse code and radios to answer questions. Next, we moved on to navigation where we all had different tasks to complete. These included a written quiz, making a route card, taking bearings on a compass, and testing our knowledge of map symbols. We then made our way to the section attack stand where we carried out a section attack using blank rounds. This was a really good learning experience for everyone as the officers leading this stand gave us some useful feedback on things we needed to improve on but also things that went well. After that, we went to the command task stand where we had two tasks that required us to communicate well to work efficiently as a team and complete each task. 

We then went to a first aid stand where we had to deal with different first aid scenarios in a high-pressure environment. I felt that this improved my first aid hugely as we got an idea of what it would be in a real first aid situation.

Our final stand of the day was an Air rifle range. This was a five metre range and we shot using a Scorpion rifle. 

All in all, I found that the Military Skills Competition was an amazing experience in which I learned many new skills and improved my Military knowledge.

LCpl Mwesigwa