British Army tests e-bike tactics in Canadian prairie exercise

British paratroopers has spent 96 hours firing anti-tank missiles from the Canadian prairie while riding electric bikes into position, testing whether an aircraft-portable e-bike can genuinely replace the boots-on-the-ground tactics paratroopers have relied on since World War II, the British Army reported.

The Anti-Tank Platoon of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, known as 2 PARA, trialled a fast-moving strike force mounted on Sting e-bikes during Exercise Rhino Bizz, a training event held at British Army Training Unit Suffield in Canada, an expansive prairie training area commonly referred to by its acronym BATUS. The concept is straightforward but tactically significant: soldiers ride e-bikes out to strike enemy targets from a greater distance than they could reach on foot, then use that same speed and quiet mobility to withdraw before an enemy can locate and return fire, improving both their chances of survival and their ability to strike again from a different position.

During a 96-hour simulated battle, drones and electronic warfare sensors scanned the vast BATUS plains to locate targets for the platoon, which moved in four-soldier teams on e-bikes, supported by a quad bike and trailer hauling missiles and batteries. The troops fired Javelin missiles, the U.S.-made FGM-148 anti-tank weapon that has been in service since 1996 and seen combat in conflicts including Afghanistan and Iraq, to destroy armored vehicles, while also employing Anti-Structures Munitions to blast through walls and clear a path for Canadian infantry assaulting a simulated village, and providing supporting fire from Grenade Machine Guns that quad bikes moved into firing position.

Colour Sergeant Shaun Nicholls, the Anti-Tank Platoon’s second-in-command, explained why swapping traditional foot movement for e-bikes has fundamentally changed how far and how fast the unit can operate on the battlefield.

“What e-bikes give us is manoeuvrability and survivability, growing the area that we can engage the enemy in,” Nicholls said.

Nicholls emphasized that the shift represents a genuine departure from how light infantry units like the Parachute Regiment have traditionally fought, given that paratroopers have historically relied almost entirely on their own legs to close with and engage the enemy after landing.

“As paratroopers, we are light infantry and moving on foot is how we traditionally operate, using e-bikes has given us so much more mobility. We can now go further and faster to hit the enemy further away from our own positions,” Nicholls said.

The Anti-Tank Platoon has spent roughly a year building the riding skills and developing the tactics behind this approach, working with the Royal Air Force to test whether the e-bikes themselves could survive an actual combat parachute drop, successfully proving the bikes can be dropped into action alongside the paratroopers who will ride them rather than requiring a separate, slower resupply once troops are already on the ground. That combination of parachute-droppable equipment and light infantry mobility echoes a much older piece of paratrooper history, since British airborne forces first experimented with small folding motorcycles called Welbikes during Operation Market Garden in 1944, giving today’s e-bike trials a lineage that stretches back to the earliest days of British airborne warfare, even though the underlying technology has changed completely.

Nicholls framed the broader effort as part of a deliberate culture within the regiment that pushes soldiers to keep adapting rather than settling into familiar tactics.

“We’re trailblazing the use of e-bikes for the Army, and the guys are keen to learn new skills and develop how we fight. Paratroopers have a real innovative spirit, we want to be the best soldiers, and we know we must change how we operate to keep that edge,” Nicholls said.

Exercise Rhino Bizz brought together roughly 350 British and Canadian troops over a two-week training period, with 16 Air Assault Brigade, 2 PARA’s parent formation, joining Canadian forces to test what the British Army calls the recce-strike concept, a doctrine that fuses reconnaissance, surveillance, and strike capabilities into a single artificial intelligence-enabled network designed to identify and destroy enemy targets faster and from greater distances than traditional methods allow.

The concept forms a central pillar of the Ministry of Defence’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which concluded that future battlefield lethality will increasingly come from drones and autonomous systems rather than traditional armored vehicles and artillery, a judgment drawn directly from observed patterns in the war in Ukraine, where the side able to find, identify, and destroy targets fastest has consistently gained the advantage. Lieutenant Colonel Shephard, commanding elements involved in the exercise, described Rhino Bizz as proof the British Army could already fight using currently available technology rather than waiting years for future systems to arrive, telling Forces News the exercise demonstrates the ability to find and strike the enemy further away, faster, more precisely, and, more importantly, first.

None of this technology changes the fundamentals of what makes an effective soldier, and Nicholls’ own comments make clear the Army understands that distinction. Hardware and software can only perform as well as the people using them, and the paratroopers pedaling across the Canadian prairie this month were not simply testing a piece of equipment, they were testing whether an entire unit’s tactical instincts could adapt fast enough to keep pace with a battlefield that increasingly rewards speed, distance, and the ability to disappear the moment a shot has been fired.