Friday, March 16, 2018

Answering the Call from the 1980s

The Army is adding equipment sets for two armored brigade combat teams in Europe:

Four years after the Army rolled its last tanks out of Europe, the service has sent back a brigade’s worth of equipment to have on stand-by and plans to add a second set this year. ...

The vehicles, housed in Belgium and the Netherlands, are in addition to the brigade’s worth of equipment and personnel that are continually in Europe, as part of a heel-to-toe rotation that began in 2016.

So America can quickly have three Army heavy brigades in Europe in addition to the parachute brigade and Stryker brigade already based in Europe.

I'm assuming that after we get enough practice moving brigades to Europe for the heel-to-toe deployments from the continental United States that a brigade will be permanently stationed in Poland, notwithstanding any now-obsolete agreements with Russia about that.

The Marines are also beefing up their equipment stored in Norway to support what sounds like possibly a brigade of Marines.

And eventually we'll need a corps headquarters back in Europe, (although because of Russian aggression now we need a heavy corps rather than a lighter corps as I wanted when I argued for keeping a corps--see pp. 15-20).

We took our eye of the European ball and now are making up for our mistake.

And please note that America pulled out our last tank from Europe 5 years ago, demonstrating how ridiculous the Russian claim that NATO poses a military threat to Russia has been.