Is NATO Really Ready for a War?
A German Army Leopard 2 tank during Saber Junction 2012. Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army Europe
Elisabeth Braw
When Jürgen Bornemann was a junior army officer in West Germany’s Bundeswehr, he spent many months of every year practicing getting his unit from its base to likely conflict zones near West Germany’s border with East Germany. His unit was not alone. “Entire divisions were moved within West Germany,” Bornemann, who went on to become a lieutenant general and director general of NATO’s international staff, told me. (A division consists of some fifteen thousand soldiers.)
Practicing movements involving tens of thousands of troops towards potential hot spots was, in fact, a main component of NATO’s Cold War defense planning. “NATO was constantly practicing, fine-tuning deploying fifty thousand troops across the Atlantic and moving them across Europe,” said Ian Brzezinski, an assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush. “It was a demonstration, but it was also a way of making sure the wheels were always greased.”
Source URL (retrieved on February 11, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/nato-really-ready-war-19386
