With more of our forces at home rather than being forward deployed, we place more emphasis on being able to quickly move to overseas bases to fight. To do that, we don't want the first time we see the base to be the second day of war when our people step off the transport planes or get out of their cockpits.
In Poland, we'll keep the lights on so deploying will go smoothly:
Stavridis, NATO’S supreme allied commander for Europe and commander of U.S. European Command, heralded the first full-time presence of U.S. service members in Poland. The new 10-person aviation detachment, based at Lask Air Base, will support combined fighter and transport operations as they are joined by up to 200 visiting airmen conducting quarterly training rotations.
“The idea is to keep a small number of our U.S. airmen ‘on the ground’ in Poland, while we rotate in F-16 [Fighting Falcon jets] and C-130 [Hercules] transport aircraft for mutual training together,” Stavridis wrote.
Next year, the periodic rotations for short periods will begin. It won't be a continuous presence.
More troops will arrive when we start putting in missile defense installations (assuming post-election "flexibility" doesn't truncate or end those plans).
I'd like a NATO ground presence on standby, too:
[We] should establish American, British, and German equipment depots for additional heavy brigades in southern Poland. If we can fly in troops to man these forces, in a return of forces to Poland (REFORPOL) concept, we'd enhance deterrence without forward deploying powerful NATO offensive units that would scare the Russians in reality instead of their faux fear of Georgians and Latvians. Those units could swing north or south or stay put once manned and fielded.
So far, counting on a benign Russia that is a strategic partner, we've extended NATO membership east without extending NATO military strength east in any significant fashion. It is time to correct that mistake. Russia has shown they'll strike at gaps in our defenses. Fill those gaps.
This is especially important since we are gutting our Europe-based Army forces down to a mere 2-brigade force (1 airborne and one Stryker).
Not that I expect the Russians to roll west. They seem to be doing their best to forfeit even a hint of that capability. But it's cheap insurance, all things considered, as we focus on other areas of the planet that require our attention and assets.
