Lytenburgh wrote:For all of you screaming "NATO STRONK!" I have a little somehting penned by the "Bloomberg":NATO's Response to Putin's Odd War Games Won't Be Fast
(Bloomberg) -- As the Kremlin’s warplanes probe the edges of NATO airspace, the alliance says its forces are ready if the Russians come. Political leaders will need a little longer to issue the marching orders...
Who will order the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to strike back is less clear. The 28 governments in the U.S.-led alliance will all want a say, potentially slowing the deployment of a 5,000-man rapid-reaction force being set up to defend eastern Europe.
NATO’s commander “does not have peacetime operational control and would have to wait for allied governments to make a decision,” said John R. Deni, a professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The concern is “something less than a very clear attack, an obvious assault, tanks crossing the border. That would require time for the alliance to figure out what’s going to happen. Depending on the nature of the crisis, that delay could be substantial...”
... Most of the 75,000 U.S. soldiers still in Europe are stationed in the west and the south -- far from the alliance’s potential eastern flashpoints.
Real Danger
U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon warned Feb. 18 of a “real and present danger” of undercover operations against the Baltics, the Telegraph newspaper reported. Latvia’s defense minister, Raimonds Vejonis, said while that probability is “very low,” Russia’s leaders “are quite unpredictable and we have to be ready to react to different scenarios.”
Dedicated by its founding treaty in 1949 to countering an “armed attack,” NATO is poorly equipped to fend off an invasion that doesn’t look like one. Military men openly wonder whether their political bosses would be caught napping. Speaking at Royal United Services Institute in London on Feb. 20, U.K. General Adrian Bradshaw, the alliance’s deputy supreme commander, said an “ambiguous” attack would make “collective decisions relating to the appropriate responses more difficult.” ...
Reaction Force
After years of American pressure on Europe to boost defense spending and do more for its security, European governments agreed in Wales to field the bulk of a rapid-reaction force that could send its first units to the front lines within 48 hours, complete the deployment within a week and eventually grow to 30,000 troops.
An interim force made up of German, Dutch and Norwegian troops force is in training. As of 2016, leadership of the brigade-size land force will rotate among Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. Backed by air, sea and special operations units, its capability will be gradually increased until reaching full readiness in 2017.
What happens if deterrence fails remains to be worked out.In the first hours of a conflict, the democratic notion that war is too important to be left to generals could put NATO at a tactical disadvantage. Ioan Mircea Pascu, a former Romanian defense minister now in the European Parliament, predicts that “real serious decisions would have to be taken, and will be taken, as they were in the EU on the sanctions.” ...
NATO’s militaries are run from a headquarters in southern Belgium, traditionally under the command of an American officer, currently U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove. As defense ministers debated alliance reinforcements on Feb. 5 in Brussels, a senior official told reporters that Breedlove’s forces will be under political control “at all times.”
What that means in practice will be discussed by defense ministers in June. One option is to give the military command the peacetime right to call snap exercises of the readiness force. Emergency powers are trickier, especially in case of a “hybrid” infiltration.
“It makes no sense to have a rapidly deployable brigade if you can’t take political decisions on a commensurate timeline,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute said Feb. 11 on a media conference call. “This too is an element of the readiness action plan which has not yet been decided.”
Yeah, it took the NATO nations a few years to respond to what Germany was up to in the 30's. Properly slow. The US was really late to that one.
Still, look what happened to Germany in the end....
