Reset!
Russia’s Zapad-13 military exercises in Belarus are scheduled to end Thursday. They included practice attacks on a western state, said one official familiar with reports of the maneuvers.
Some 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops took part with over 60 aircraft and helicopters and up to 250 vehicles.
The forces practiced “rapid reaction” drills. ...
On the Russian air base, Russian air force chief Lt. Gen. Vladimir Bondarev announced in June that the air base for Su-27 jets in Belarus would be opened near the city of Lida, near the border with Poland and Lithuania.
Bondarev said the warplanes would bolster a 1997 defense agreement between the two countries in response to NATO expansion.
It will be Russia’s first military base in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and along with it the Warsaw Pact, in 1991. Moscow currently has military bases in Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. ...
War game scenarios include an “escalation of relations with countries based on interethnic, interreligious differences, and territorial claims,” he said.
“At the same time, the conflicting states are hypothetically located within the actual borders of Belarus and the three western and northwestern regions of Russia,” [Belarusian Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Pyotr ] Tsikhanowski said.
One, the Russians are not too subtly threatening Poland (which is reacting to rumors that the Russians would use nukes to attack Poland), Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Russians are still not happy to have lost Poland to NATO, nor are they happy that the former parts of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states represent are in NATO. This exercise helps the Russians regain the ability to project power west and will give them the ability to attack NATO.
So it is about time we looked at how to defend these new NATO states from aggression.
And two, the new air base for Russia is part of the creeping Anschluss that Russia is carrying out with Belarus.
I had hoped that we'd keep a robust American Army in NATO Europe not only as a force capable of intervening in an arc of crisis that stretches from western Africa to Afghanistan, but also to keep Europe safe from potential threats from a revived Russia in the future.
Alas, we are keeping our plans to go down to a single paratrooper brigade and a single Stryker brigade in Europe. Those are fine for the initial forces in the arc of crisis, but aren't sufficient for reassuring our new NATO allies in eastern Europe and keeping the Russians quiet as they shift west.
I hope we hedge a bit by putting heavy brigade sets in Poland.
And while I welcome NATO efforts to build small, high quality forces capable of being projected abroad that can work with our forces, I hope that the Europeans don't neglect the capability to regenerate conventional forces by maintaining a core conventional heavy capability backed by reserves and the capacity to build new units if the Russian threat is rebuilt by Moscow.
Look, Russia is a long way from threatening to march to the Rhine. But they are much more close to being able to threaten and bully a small country like any of the Baltic nations, as the 2008 Georgia War demonstrated. Ultimately, if we are reducing our presence in Europe to focus our shrinking military on Asia and the rest of the world, we need NATO Europe capable of holding their own territory without immediate and massive US help.
