The British media reported on Monday that the government of Prime Minister David Cameron plans to send more than 1,600 troops to Jordan for a major logistics war game.

The purpose of the game will be to exercise an Iraq invasion-scale operation for the first time in more than a decade.

The British Army will in fact try to ensure that it can still dispatch a 30,000-strong force to a crisis zone anywhere in the world, despite sharp cuts in the past five years.

The war game will be codenamed “Exercise Shamal Storm” and the British Army says it could be a dry run for one day having to send a large armoured force of British troops to Eastern Europe if there was ever a Russian confrontation with NATO, The Telegraph has quoted government sources as saying.

More than 300 military vehicles are being shipped to Jordan, where logistics, medical, intelligence and bomb disposal experts will practise supporting a massive British military expedition.

Army sources also said despite being held in Jordan, bordering Syria, the desert exercise was not a dress rehearsal for sending British troops against the ISIL terrorist group.

“This isn’t a counter-ISIL exercise. If anything, this is much more about us being prepared to join the US in Ukraine than it is in Syria,” one source has told The Telegraph.

“This is not the sort of kind of force you expect to roll into Aleppo to take on a bunch of jihadists.”