The U.S. military, which is cutting its presence in Europe, plans to expand its training of European partners to cope with new threats posed by interlinked criminal and militant networks smuggling weapons and drugs, said the U.S. commander in Europe. ...
"Even with the loss of two brigades I will have close to 35,000 soldiers here. That is a big force size and bigger than most European armies," Lieutenant General Mark Hertling told Reuters in an interview.
"It is the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one, because the threats these forces were positioned for in the past are not the types of threats we have today," he said on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich. ...
Amidst calls from some politicians and strategists at the Munich conference for "smart defence" or a greater pooling of resources, Hertling said the U.S. military was already enacting this with its training.
"We just have to refine our skills in linking partners together," he said.
Current training, Hertling said, concentrated on "hybrid" threats where criminals may work with conventional forces, or with "terrorists," sharing weapons or drugs.
Sadly, part of our alliance thinking about making our smaller armies sufficient to defend the alliance is assuming that the threats are smaller, too: "hybrid" threats that are just militarized criminal gangs, or something. That's a convenient assumption, no?
With a paratrooper brigade and a Stryker brigade (a cavalry regiment) in Europe bolstered by a US brigade back in America that will rotate battalions through training sites in Bulgaria and Romania (and which is dedicated to the NATO Response Force), we will have to build a core of ground combat capabilities that might be adequate for an actual conventional military threat--which is what militaries are supposed to be about.
Even with our planned cuts, our Army will still be head and shoulders above the rest of our NATO allies in capabilities and combat-ready brigades. We need to scrape up the bits of smaller-level capabilities that our NATO allies retain. I think we should use these planned training missions to train as many European battalions as we can to work within an American brigade.
Start with the American brigade earmarked for the NRF. When it rotates battalions through eastern Europe, team our battalions up with a couple European battalions who will then be commanded by the brigades headquarters with a forward element in the field and the rest of the brigade linked up via satellite to the rest of the brigade headquarters back in the United States.
Then start using those two US Europe-based brigades to train in our European facilities designed for a much bigger force to work with allied paratrooper battalions and motorized cavalry or infantry units. These American brigades would already have two line battalions in place and could train with 1 or 2 additional European battalions (I'm not sure what we consider our span of control to be, but this would help find out if we don't know after years at war with these new brigades).
We could also bring in our heavy brigade combat team that will use American troops based in the United States to fly in to draw equipment kept in a unit set in Europe. We could practice flying in our troops to draw the equipment while a European ally sends a battalion or two to the site to link up with the newly arrived American brigade, and conduct joint training.
Then we need to expand this prepositioned equipment posture in NATO Europe (which was once much bigger during the Cold War). I'd like to see at least a couple American heavy brigade sets moved to southern Poland. I used to think it would be nice to have the British and Germans contribute a brigade set, but that won't happen now. Perhaps if the British and Germans (and maybe the Dutch and Danes?) set up battalion sets in southern Poland co-located with our brigade sets there, we could expand the usage of allied battalions within our brigades even more.
Back home in America, we could team up with the high quality Canadian army to familiarize their battalions with our brigade command structure to make it easier to integrate them into our units, too, if Canada wishes to help.
Could our Army National Guard also contribute to this integration through their national partnership program with NATO countries? This could also expand the types of training to national disaster or even--dare I utter it--"hybrid" threats, in addition to conventional combat. Remember, our Army National Guard units are very good and suffer only by being compared to our active duty Army.
Our NATO allies are losing the ability to deploy many brigades as complete combat units. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and even Spain should be able to muster some. Heck, Canada should be able to do this, too, if it wants to. But most of their units capable of combat will be battalions or smaller. And the rest of the NATO countries will be lucky to have a battalion or two of combat ready troops. As it is, even our allied brigades need to be plugged into an American division headquarters, so this is just a different scale of what we do jointly.
By incorporating NATO battalions into our brigades we can make the scattered pockets of capabilities an actual army in case our military alliance has to face more than just a hypbrid threat and fight an actual enemy army.
UPDATE: Oh, and maybe we could organize some cadre brigades from active and reserve assets to receive line European battalions. This might work very well through the National Guard partnership program.
