'Spartan' (i) was a British exercise by General Sir Bernard Paget’s Home Forces, with emphasis on the part of the RAF, to rehearse the liberation of North-West Europe (March 1943).

The undertaking was the last grand-scale manoeuvre undertaken by the British in the UK before the implementation of 'Overlord', and was primarily important for its lessons in the improvement of ground/air co-operation.

The undertaking was also used to validate the concept of British and US 'Jedburgh' teams under the supervision of the Special Operations Executive and Office of Strategic Services. Though bearing a number of conceptual similarities to both the early ideas for the Independent Companies and the work of the SOE’s Mission 101 and the 'Gideon' Force in Abyssinia during 1940/41, the basic notion for the creation of such teams can be traced back to May 1942 and the discussions of two SOE regional directors, Major Peter Wilkinson and Major Robin Brook. These two men understood that if partisan and resistance movements were to be of benefit to the Allies' conventional operations, they had to be adequately equipped and well led. The two men therefore proposed the formation of dedicated specialist groups for despatch, in uniform, into occupied territories to arm, train, exploit and co-ordinate partisan and resistance forces in concert with the conventional campaign. It was this concept which was tested and validated in 'Spartan' (i).

The OSS, Free French and Belgian representatives observing the exercises were all suitably impressed with the concept, and thus agreed to participate directly in what was primarily an SOE initiative. The project, which soon gained the name 'Jedburgh', thus became a multi-national undertaking, and recruiting was thus undertaken from SOE, OSS, Free French, Free Dutch and Free Belgian sources for the creation of three-man teams with one SOE or OSS officer, one bilingual officer (preferably a native of the occupied nation in which any particular team was designed to operate), and one trained radio operator.