But anonymity seems likely to be elusive when Flight Lt. William Wales, a.k.a. Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge and second in line to the British throne, arrives this week in the Falkland Islands to begin his first overseas military tour at the Mount Pleasant air base on the islands.

The Falklands are a windswept, largely barren cluster of islands near the southern tip of South America, 8,000 miles from Britain, with a population of 3,000 and an economy worth less than $170 million a year. They cover an area about the size of Connecticut. They have one commercial air link to the outside world, a return flight once a week to Chile. Formally, they are an overseas dependency of Britain.

Prince William will be deploying barely two months before the 30th anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the islands on April 2, 1982, at a time when muffled drum rolls can be heard as the governments in London and Buenos Aires square off with each other again over their rival claims to sovereignty over the islands.

To hear British military spokesmen tell it, the prince volunteered for the deployment as part of the flight training needed to be promoted to squadron leader and take the command seat in the Sea King helicopters he flies.

The fact that he will be arriving on the eve of the anniversary, senior British commanders say, is pure coincidence and not at all the "provocation" the Argentine government has called it. "He is coming down to do his job, as any of the search-and-rescue crews do," Brig. Bill Aldridge, commander of the 1,200 British servicemen on the islands, told The Times of London. "Let the chap get on with his job."

But there seems little chance of that. Prince William is big news in Britain, seen by many, with his wife, Catherine, as the potential savior of the monarchy after the indiscretions that have tainted the reputations of other young royals in recent years. The story of the young prince flying into a political storm — almost literally — seems sure to be irresistible to Britain's sensationalist tabloids.

For all the skirmishing, few political commentators in either country see another war as likely. The 1982 conflict, lasting barely 10 weeks, saw Britain send a naval task force and ground troops who eventually forced the surrender of the Argentine forces who had seized the islands, but not before more than 900 soldiers and seamen on the two sides had lost their lives. More than 650 of those were Argentines, half of them killed in the controversial sinking by a British nuclear submarine of an Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano.

In the years after the conflict, Britain and Argentina largely patched up their differences. But the end of military rule in Argentina and the economic recovery in the past decade, particularly under the current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, brought an intensification of Argentine agitation over the 180-year-old Falklands dispute.

Mrs. Kirchner has renewed accusations that Britain's rule in the Falklands is a colonial holdover, and her vehemence has centered on the discovery of potentially lucrative reserves of oil there that lie within the British economic exclusion zone.

British officials say new data on the oil discoveries — initially estimated by some oil industry experts to be in the billions of barrels — have been disappointing.

But Argentina has added oil grievances to anger over the "squid wars," a dispute over rich hauls of squid that are spawned along Argentina's coast before moving into waters off the Falklands. Mrs. Kirchner said at a summit meeting of regional states in December that Las Malvinas, Argentina's name for the islands, were "a global cause, because in the Malvinas they are taking our oil and fishing resources."

Her government has taken new steps to isolate the islands economically, and prices of essential supplies have risen sharply. Some Kirchner aides have gone further, warning that Argentine forces could mount a new attack to seize the islands.

With an eye to 1982, when Britain was caught off guard, Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered military preparations. Britain has a force of 1,200 on the islands, but only 150 combat troops. It has a small flotilla of naval vessels in the area, including, naval sources say, a nuclear attack submarine, and has stationed four Typhoons, the Royal Air Force's top-line fighter interceptor, at a major new air base built after the 1982 conflict. The islands have their own small paramilitary force, equipped with all-terrain vehicles to negotiate the difficult terrain.

But retired military commanders, including some who fought in 1982, have warned that the government's decision in 2010 to scrap Britain's only fixed-wing aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, along with its complement of Harrier jump-jets, would make recovery of the islands impossible if Argentina seized the Mount Pleasant airfield.

For now, though, the contest remains polemical. Mr. Cameron seemed to relish his riposte to Mrs. Kirchner in mid-January when he told Parliament that Argentina, not Britain, was living in the past, seeking to impose its will on the islanders who, he said, were overwhelmingly of British descent. "What the Argentinians have been saying recently, I would argue, is actually far more like colonialism, because these people want to remain British, and the Argentinians want them to do something else," he said.

Not surprisingly, that provoked a vituperative response from Amado Boudou, Mrs. Kirchner's vice president. "It's a clumsy, historically misinformed and inappropriate thing to say," he said, adding that Mr. Cameron "should reread his history books to understand what colonialism is."