January 2021: GRIFFIN FORCE I 2021 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland)
An exercise aimed at training the land component of the NATO VJTF (Very
High Readiness Joint Task Force), the commands involved in its deployment,
as well as host and receiving nations. The purpose is to train the enablement of
NATO forces and rapid military mobility.
April 2021: RAMSTEIN ALLOY 1, 2 and 3 (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia)
These live exercises have Article 5 scenarios, with a focus on the Air domain.
They will promote interoperability, coordination and work with partners
Finland and Sweden
April 2021: LOCKED SHIELDS 21 (Estonia)
One of the world’s largest and most complex live cyber defence exercises, hosted annually by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.
NATO cyber defenders participate alongside their colleagues from many Allies
and partners. The exercise simulates responding to a massive cyber incident, and includes strategic decision-making, legal and communication aspects.
April 2021: THREE SWORDS 2021 (Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania)
Ukraine, the United States, Poland and Lithuania launched joint military exercises on Monday, amid ongoing tensions between Kiev and Moscow.
The drills, dubbed “Three Swords 2021,” will involve more than 1,200 military personnel and over 200 combat vehicles, and will take place at Yavoriv training ground in the western Lviv region until July 30, the military said.
May 2021: SPRING STORM 21 (Estonia)
A large live exercise of the Estonian Defence Forces, with participation from
NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups and other Allied forces.
Some 14,000 military personnel are expected to participate
May 2021: DEFENDER EUROPE 21 (which includes the following “linked” exercises–SWIFT RESPONSE, IMMEDIATE RESPONSE and SABER GUARDIAN).
The Defender Europe 21 exercise will also include several smaller “linked” exercises, Kirby said. Those include Swift Response, which involves airborne operations in Estonia, Bulgaria and Romania; Immediate Response, which involves more than 5,000 troops from eight nations conducting live-fire training in 12 different countries; Saber Guardian, which includes more than 13,000 service members doing live-fire training as well as air and missile defense operations; and a command post exercise with 2,000 personnel exercising the ability of a headquarters to command multinational land forces.
May 2021: NOBLE JUMP II 21 (Romania)
This exercise will see the deployment of elements of the VJTF to test NATO’s
deployment functions and the NATO Force Integration Units (NFIU) concept.
July 2021: SEA BREEZE 2021
The Navy and international partners on Monday began the annual Sea Breeze exercise in the Black Sea.
The drills, led by the U.S. and Ukraine, will continue through July 10, according to a Navy news release.
“This year’s iteration has the largest number of participating nations in the exercise’s history with 32 countries from six continents providing 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operations and dive teams scheduled to participate,” the service said in the news release issued last week.
September 2021: RAPID TRIDENT
Ukraine on Monday launched joint military exercises with the United States and other NATO countries as tensions with Russia remain high over the Kremlin-backed insurgency in the country’s east.
The annual Rapid Trident military exercises, taking place in western Ukrainian until October 1, involve some 6,000 soldiers from 15 countries, Ukraine’s defense ministry said in a statement.
The head of the exercises, Brigadier General Vladyslav Klochkov, said the drills were “an important step towards Ukraine’s European integration.”
Can you imagine the outrage that would sweep across the United States if Russia’s Army or Navy conducted a military exercise on our border with Cuba, Mexico or Canada? Yet we expect the Russians to ignore our provocations on their borders and then we shriek with faux outrage when Putin and his Generals protest our show of military force on their frontier. The United States has not been invaded by a foreign Army since the War of 1812.
Russia, by contrast, still bears the searing scars of being invaded by the Nazis in World War II. Their legitimate worry about a new invasion from the West is not a mere conspiracy theory. Compounding the Russian’s concern is that the United States and its allies have aligned themselves with the grandsons and granddaughters of the Ukrainians who joined up with the Nazis and fought along the Germans against Russia.
In fact, many of the Ukrainians we are backing still celebrate their NAZI heritage:
What really sticks in my craw is the fact that the United States is holding more political prisoners in prison hell holes in American than Russia. There was a time when we, as a country, had the moral authority to condemn human rights violations in Russia. No longer. Biden and his crew, with the help of some vocal Republicans, have locked up and prosecuted hundreds of American citizens for the simple act of walking into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We have more U.S. citizens imprisoned in the American Gulag than there are Russians in the actual Gulag. And now Biden wants your sons and daughters to risk their lives fighting in Ukraine while his son remains unpunished for his Burisma grift.
Biden’s handlers continue to hoard wealth, letting the rest of the US lurch forward into a quagmire of inflationary hell (at least for the bottom 50%). If they want to keep that gig going, at least until the next election, they need something to keep the public distracted.
Putin as the new Hitler seems to meet that requirement.
I travelled to Kiev and Lviv in 2015, and the streets and fascists were already dripping with rabid hatred and desire for revenge against the Russian speaking east. Most of the people I knew in Ukraine, who weren’t stirred by such sentiments, have since left, abandoning what they saw early on as the slow-motion collapse of Ukraine under the tutelage of European elites that denied any Russian historical connections or future economic participation. The nationalists who remained have only gained in power and prestige since that time.
With so many actors in the West able to benefit from a conflagration in Ukraine, it seems likely that things will boil over.
The French will be happy to have further pressure on Russian exports, opening up in particular more weapons sales for them and making competition easier. The British will be thrilled to have a reason to demand a sizable increase in military funding. The Germans will be happy to have NATO forces increase in number within their country, providing a stealth stimulus to its economy, and helping its industrial concerns sell more military components to enlarging NATO forces. The Polish will be smiling as governments across Europe are forced to support them, regardless of how much they rail against and spurn European institutions and diktats. The Turks will be laughing as their geopolitical position will be further strengthened, eager to press their “gains” in Syria further with Russia distracted.
What can Russia offer these European elites in return (and that is who I refer to when I use nationalities), other than abject submission? In reality, that is closer to the actual demands being made implicitly through Western practices, in the recent past, the present and outlined for the future.
I feel we will all be surprised how Putin responds, once the West again ignores his rather reasonable offers.
Nothing has changed. The neocons continue to run US foreign policy no matter which party is in power. Yet most folks keep with the tribal partisan and left/right battles. Keep voting the duopoly and expecting change. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
What with the Think Thanks and the Foundations and all the rest of it the neocons have a powerful base. A powerful academic base too, if you in America have the equivalent of our Integrity Initiative. Recently I wanted to see how the people egging the Ukrainians on see it from their side of the fence. Came across this:-
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/4/29/ukraine-the-epicenter-of-hybrid-warfare-and-why-the-west-must-win-there
“Yet the opportunities to reshape the Kremlin’s strategic calculations are clear and readily available in Ukraine. As the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe spelled the end of the Soviet Union, updating former National Security Advisor Brzezinski’s prescient comment for today’s struggle reveals the same opportunity—the survival of an independent and democratic Ukraine means defeat for Russia’s revanchist empire, and that will always be in the interest of the United States and its democratic allies.”
Detestable stuff. Easy enough to take the underlying premises apart. But there’s such oceans and oceans of it around. The amount of money that must go into producing such material is incalculable,
And when it comes to information warfare, no contest. In the public arena it conquers by sheer weight of numbers.
EO,
I thought it was a pretty good article. Sure it doesn’t allay any fears, but it just describes what changes are occurring in strategic thought all over. Our developing Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept is really no different. Rather than talking of a state of peace, it talks of a state of strategic competition. IO is central. There’s nothing sinister or evil about either our or Russia’s doctrine. It’s just the logical development to military, technological and informational changes.
It’s a little worrying, TTG, seeing us all pushing it in the Ukraine.
On the MDO concept, a lay question, if I might put one. It looks advanced and complex. How would other NATO forces that are not at that level be integrated?
MDO emphasizes synchronized long range fires with sensor/reconnaissance and tactical level unit actions across all domains. Although it seems to rely on effective communications even if they are intermittent, a great reliance is placed on liaison elements and knowing how all the parts can work together without that seamless communication capability. We did something similar in Special Forces/special operations where disparate and allied units shared liaison elements to enable effective cooperation without constant commo links. Sounds complicated, but it worked even with very different forces with very different capabilities.
EO,
I’ll add that MDO is not meant to blunt a swift invasion by 50 to 100 BTG. That’s what Ukraine’s total mobilization defense is meant to deal with. Total mobilization, territorial defense and guerilla operations won’t blunt that kind of invasion, either, but it’s meant to make such an invasion too costly to undertake and sustain. The Baltics are using the same defense strategy.
One ugly by-product of all anti-Russian carry-on is the action of the US in rejecting the UN resolution against the ‘glorification of Nazism’ a few weeks ago. As someone who (like millions of others) lost family members in the fight against Nazism in the last war, I find the US action frankly abhorrent. The fact that some others countries abstained is bad enough but rejecting the resolution is beyond the pale. Especially chilling is the fact that there was hardly any complaint from US press or its citizens
mr putin has stated that any attack against russia will see those missiles shot down, the platforms where they are located will also be destroyed AND the command and control centers from which those orders were given will be destroyed as well. this means nato command centers in brussels, germany, romania and continental usa will become targets as well as all the ships, plane and bases where the missiles are located.
nato, american and ukrainian soldiers on the ground will be greeted by mr thermobaric and will enmasse disappear. the debaltsevo cauldrons of 2014-2015 which precipitated the west to hurriedly and desperately seek the minsk accords will feel like a swedish massage.
this imo is what frightens the war mongers in the west, and thus far keeping a leash on their worst impulses….. having the war brought to their front door………say hello to mr iskander, mr zircon, mr nudol and mr avangard from which you in the west have no defense against.
Col. Lang, Mr. Johnson,
With your indulgence, I would like to drop a couple of thread comments from another blog – one by me, two from other posters – on this.
These were the comments preceding mine to which I was responding:
The big question is, are there still enough people in our so-called “Elite” who understand that a nuclear war, probably even a non-nuclear war, would mean the end of their power, and their deaths on a massive scale. My guess is probably, but barely, and things are not headed in the direction of greater engagement with reality in DC. The arrogance of these people is staggering, and they seem to believe that they are bullet-proof, in both the literal and figurative sense. They will find out differently, if they provoke a war with Russia.
Reply ↓
Wouldn’t it be lovely if, instead of a war in response to US aggression, Putin employed various means to take out US leaders and their families to neutralize the threat?
This one by me was in response:
Well, it could certainly come to that. President Putin has rather pointedly suggested that the shit stirrers against Russia would be in for a wakeup call.
Their military doctrine clearly targets follow-on forces, and particularly logistics and command and control for a pasting in the event of a throwdown. Make those REMFs have a very bad day.
Another recent event, not yet remarked upon in this thread (or at least the part that I have so far read), is their recent destruction, by ground or air launched means, of one of their old satellites as a means of both demonstrating capability, as well as their intention to make space-based assets of any serious adversary a target. This would disrupt intelligence gathering, communications, and targeting for the US’s heavily satellite-dependent military forces. This “test” let it be known that that disruptive capability is operational, and not merely aspirational.
Here is one final comment from that thread:
Just in time for Christmas. The gift that would keep on giving for generations. A “decapitation strike” from the head of that venomous serpent now sitting with razor wire all around it. We should be so lucky…
Well, some of us are grown quite weary with these tyrants who misrule over us; we’ve gotten pretty bloody-minded. Their unhinged lunacy is imperiling hundreds of millions of lives of innocent people.
This is where “liberal democracy” has landed us, dread for our very lives. We ain’t voting our way out of this.
N.B.: the last two paragraphs were written by me, and not by the final commenter cited.
Thank you,
JJ
Ran across this yesterday. At the time, of course, we were virtuously denying we were doing any such thing and the US Congress had passed some sort of law about not training the Ukronazis. And here she is boasting about it.
https://ucpbacalgary.ca/event/march-31-2016-one-canadians-experience-training-the-azov-batallion-to-nato-standards/
Wear it with pride…..so Canadian, pump up their sorry little asses……both my Gramps killed their share of Nazis….. apparently they didn’t kill them all. The up side, should festivities break out, won’t have to travel far to whack their evil offspring
Cheers Mal
Your boaster, Oksana Kuzyshin, appears to have been an already retired Ukie/Canadian logistician when she went to lecture to the Azov Battalion. Who gave her that assignment? Hard to believe it was the CAF. Perhaps one of the many Ukrainian Nationalist organizations in Canada? Or maybe your Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland asked Oksana to give instruction to the neo-Nazis. Freeland’s maternal dedushka worked for the real Nazis of the Third Reich during WW2, and she has had contacts with Ukrainian activists in the past.
For sure it was not us down here in the lower 48. The US Congress did pass a law to ban arms, training, and any other support to the Azov Battalion. It was a bipartisan vote and pushed by both Dems and the GOP. And the House condemned Ukraine’s 2015 memory laws glorifying the ultra right-wing Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its leaders in an open bipartisan letter to the Department of State. Unfortunately Fat Mike Pompeo ignored it.
Alex Baldwin has shot more Ukrainians than Putin.
Interesting comment Fred.Especially for you,unless you have the same suspicions I had about the whole kabonga.
If he bans FB and Twitter in Russia then yes. Without that no.
I have a bias of viewing things through the lens of history. What I see is from the 1600s Poland (or Poland-Lithuania if you will) caught in the vice of Russia, Sweden, and Prussia/Germany. My understanding is western Ukraine was dominated by Polish nobles / Catholicism, in conjunction with the remains of the Holy Roman Empire / Austria-Hungary.
The strategy of providing security guarantees to Poland by outside powers has never worked well.
OT: Body language between Biden and Harris – Ice Cold at Dole’s memorial service.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/shade-war-biden-refuses-acknowledge-kamala-harris-walks-past-us-capitol-asks-jill-switch-seats-wont-next-harris-video/
Lithuania borders Kalingrad Oblast as does Poland. Rail service into Kalingrad is only available through Lithuania.
Larry,
“Russia, by contrast, still bears the searing scars of being invaded by the Nazis in World War II.”
You’re absolutely right. But you’re forgetting about the searing scars of Russia’s European neighbors from decades of brutal Soviet/Russian invasion and occupation. The WTO was no picnic either. Even Western Europe was under the shadow of the 3d Shock Army and its compadres for just as long. Those scars are fairly fresh. Putin is not Stalin, but Russia is still Russia. Fifty plus BTGs on Ukraine’s borders just aggravates those scars.
TTG,
Where inside the borders of the Russian Federation will NATO allow Russia to place their troops? Which Western European nation, scared by the Soviet/Russian occupation of half the country while the other half was under the shadow of the 3rd Shock Army, is giving Russia billions of dollars, thus funding the Russian Armed forces, in exchange for natural gas via a pipeline that avoids transiting Ukrainian territory?
lol.they swapped Ghislaine for Julian.looks like maxwell was mi 6.3.wonder if it strained relations?
mcohen
MI-6? Maybe an informant, but not a staff employee.
Notice they’ve buried all details of her trial and the evidence. And they’re gonna wrap it up pretty fast.
While there is now more evidence of several high profile individuals including Clinton, Trump, Larry Summers, Dershowitz, former Israeli PM Barak, CEO of Barclays, Leon Black the CEO of hedge fund Apollo, etc on Epstein’s plane and in homes in NYC and the Caribbean in the presence of underage girls at those times, you know that it is all gonna get buried and these pedophiles are gonna get away.
Of course what do we expect when the DoJ have appointed their JV team led by Comey’s daughter to prosecute.
I’d say it is an even bet that Ghislaine get’s away too.
https://twitter.com/rudyhavenstein/status/1468987836166651908?s=21
To your point BP. The burial is happening rapidly. Pedophilia among the wealthy is fine.