In November 2010 Britain and France signed a new defense cooperation pact. Under the umbrella of the agreement a week long common air force exercise was announced in January 2011:

The French Air Force has organized a large-scale, weeklong exercise with the British Royal Air Force – which is expected to send over Tornado fighters, aerial tankers and AWACS aircraft – as part of the enhanced cooperation agreed between the two countries, an Air Force spokesman here said Jan. 13.

The exercise, dubbed Southern Mistral, will be held March 21-25 in France, the spokesman, Maj. Eric Trihoreau, said.

The scenario for Southern Mistral was:

SOUTHLAND : Dictatorship responsible for an attack against France's national interests.

FRANCE : Makes the decision to show its determination to SOUTHLAND (under United Nations Security council resolution n°3003).

UNITED-KINGDOM : Allied country as determined in the bilateral agreement. The United Kingdom supports France through the deployment of its air assets.

On March 20 the U.K., France and the U.S. started to bomb Libya. Southern Mistral was superseded by a real war:

Due to the current international events, exercise Southern Mistral has been suspended.

There is a long history of announced military exercises as cover for starting a shooting war. As we learn from the U.S. Amry War College pamphlet Deception 101:

Cover is the use of an apparently nonthreatening activity to disguise preparation for or initiation of a hostile act. A common example is the use of a training exercise to hide preparations for an attack. […] In recent years, both the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Falklands War of 1982 were launched under the cover of training exercises similar to exercises which had occurred before.

The war on Libya, first planned as Southern Mistral, is not going well. France is now arming the Berber in the Djebel Nefoussa mountain range. Even this didn't proceed as planned and it guarantees a prolonged civil war – here Berber against Arabs – even if Gaddhafi were to step aside:

The drops, all at night and totaling perhaps 36 tons, included mostly light weapons and ammunition, he said. [The leader of the military council in the western town of Rujban] complained that rebels from the neighboring city of Zintan had taken all the weapons and were not sharing them with fighters in other areas. […] The colonel said an intermediary told him on Wednesday that the French government was upset that the weapons were not being properly distributed.

This, like the very first bombing by the French immediately after the UNSC resolution 1973 was signed, is another unilateral French step which will lead to more strife within NATO. NATO had earlier ruled out arming the rebels. In a bit of balancing justice the rebels in the east managed to blow up their ammunition storage facility.

But back to military exercises and deception. What are we to think of this one?

Commander, United States Fleet Forces hosted the first of two Main Planning Conferences June 24, for Exercise Bold Alligator 2012, scheduled to take during January and February 2012.
…
Bold Alligator 2012 will be a large-scale multinational naval amphibious exercise conducted by United States Fleet Forces (USFF) and Marine Forces Command (MFC) that will focus upon the planning and execution of a brigade-sized amphibious assault from a seabase in a medium threat environment. The underlying scenario of this exercise is designed to emphasize the Navy/Marine Corps capabilities in undeveloped and immature theaters of operations.

As the Marines' hymn goes:

From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli; …

January and February 2012 may be a little late for invading Libya with ground troops. Then again, who knows how long that war will take?