It was joined by the 1st battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps from Burma and then its first commander, Major-General Percy Hobart. Hobart was an armoured warfare expert and saw that his troops were properly prepared to fight in the desert despite their poor equipment. Stewart Henry Perowne, the Public Relations Attaché at the British Embassy in Baghdad, perhaps uncharitably referred to the unit as the "Mobile Farce" because it included some obsolete tanks like the Vickers Medium Mark II.