The pounding of the 40mm cannons sends tracer shells skimming over a snow-covered ridge towards the Baltic Sea.

“The enemy has conducted an air drop near the town of Kivik that has moved up here to the north, so this is a hostile landing site for reinforcements from the sea,” Captain Johan Ström says, as he surveys the two positions taken by his four-strong platoon of CV9040 combat vehicles.

All the two vehicles lined up behind us have left to do is to take out one last enemy ‘helicopter’ — in reality a thin, metal target on a moving platform.

The air-cushioned landing craft and combat boats Capt. Ström envisages waiting offshore will then have been stripped of their last remaining protection against his platoon’s Bofors guns, with their state-of-the-art programmable ammunition.

“And that,” he grins. “would not be good.”

Ravlunda firing range has been used for this sort of exercise since the final years of the Second World War.

But what makes this unique is that the 19- and 20-year-olds operating the eight vehicles are some of the first 3,700 conscripts to be drafted since Sweden brought back national service.

In his debriefing, Colonel Bo Stennabb, the regiment’s commanding officer, heaps praise on the new recruits, telling them that he could not remember an exercise going so well.