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United states military personnel with an M16 rifle, guarding prisoners of war near the fifth Mobile Ground forces Surgical Hospital, during the Gulf War, at King Abdulaziz Air Base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 1991.

The Pentagon is in the process of preparing options for President Joe Biden regarding the deployment of US forces into NATO's eastern flank to seek to deter Russia from acting against Ukraine, or threatening NATO's easternmost members of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

Some 8,500 Us troops take been put on standby to be prepared to deploy to Europe on brusque notice. These are the United states of america contingent of the NATO Response Force, a multinational, xl,000-troop unit tasked with responding to aggression against member countries.

If the Usa wanted to do more, it could deploy a few squadrons of Us Air Forcefulness fighters, along with another heavy armored brigade, whose equipment is prepositioned in Poland, and some support troops. It could also send 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, which is tasked to "reply to crisis contingencies anywhere in the world within 18 hours."

All these troops, however, even if assembled in amass, could not stand upward to a potential Russian adversary, for the simple fact that none of these forces accept trained to fight a modern combined artillery disharmonize against a peer-level opponent. Putting troops and equipment on a battlefield is the easy office; having them perform to standard is harder, and having them execute doctrine that is no longer in vogue is impossible.

Joe Biden might think he's flexing hard with this talk of war machine power projection. All he is doing, however, is further underscoring the accented dismal country of combat readiness that the US military machine finds itself in after xx years of low-intensity conflict in a losing cause.

The time to accept deployed l,000 troops to Europe was in 2008, later on the Russian-Georgian State of war, or 2014, after the Crimea crisis. Having 50,000 well-armed US troops refocused on the difficult task of fighting a sustained basis conflict in Europe might accept forced Russia to reconsider its options. By because this option at present, all Biden is doing is proving the point that the US is a failing superpower, and NATO is lacking both purpose and drive.

A shadow of its onetime self

What a departure three decades makes. In 1990, the US Army in Europe (USAREUR) consisted of some 213,000 combat-set up forces organized into two Corps - 5 and VII - a Berlin Brigade, and the 3d Brigade of the 2d Armored Division, deployed in northern Germany to protect the port of Hamburg. Each corps consisted of one infantry division, one armored partitioning, and an armored cavalry regiment.

Through a program known as Render of Forces to Deutschland (REFORGER), USAREUR could be reinforced inside x days by another three mechanized infantry divisions (one of them Canadien) and ii armored brigades which would fill out Five and VII Corps to full strength, as well as a third corps (Iii Corps) consisting of 2 armored divisions, a mechanized infantry segmentation, a cavalry regiment, and other corps-level troops.

These forces would fall in on prepositioned armed services stores warehoused and maintained to a level of constant readiness. Betwixt the forces in Europe and those earmarked for deployment, USAREUR boasted a total gainsay capacity of over 550,000 troops which helped maintain the peace during America's long Cold War with the Soviet Union, which had around 600,000 troops stationed in eastern Europe, including 338,000 in East Federal republic of germany alone.

The authorization of United states of america forces back so went on brandish in the war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein'due south soldiers in 1991. USAREUR deployed a Corps Headquarters (the Vii) along with 75,000 personnel, 1,200 tanks, one,700 armored combat vehicles, more than than 650 pieces of artillery, and more than than 325 aircraft to the Persian Gulf to support Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade of intense combined arms warfare grooming in back up of a new Air-Land Boxing doctrine made the USAREUR forces the most gainsay capable units in the operation, helping crush the world'due south fourth largest army in a 100-hour ground combat operation that is unmatched in modern times.

Afterward preserving the peace in Europe and winning a war in the Middle East, USAREUR was rewarded by being unceremoniously tossed into the trash bin of history. In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some seventy,000 soldiers redeployed to the continental United States, part of a withdrawal that saw USAREUR compress to some 122,000 troops past the end of that twelvemonth; 12 months afterwards, information technology was down to some 62,000 soldiers. The Common cold War, we were told, was over, and there was no longer a need to shoulder the expense of maintaining a standing force in readiness because, with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there would never again exist a large-calibration ground state of war in Europe.

By 2008, the last remaining Corps-sized headquarters in USAREUR, V Corps, was rated equally the to the lowest degree valuable war machine nugget in the entire U.s.a. armed services in terms of power project capabilities.

Monkey run across, monkey do

The US wasn't the merely NATO power looking to cutting costs in the post-Common cold War era. In 1988 — a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall — the West German language Army was looking at a reorganization scheme that would retain its structure of 12 divisions with 48 brigades, but reduce the manning levels from 95% to a 'cadre structure' of but l%-70% that could be brought to full force merely through the mobilization of reserves.

By 2020, the German Army, by now representing a unified land, had been reduced to lilliputian more than 60,000 troops organized into 2 armored divisions of 6 brigades, and 1 rapid deployment division of two brigades. But even this reduced figure is misleading - to deploy a combat-capable battalion-sized armored force to the Baltics as function of NATO'southward 'battlegroup' concept, Frg has to cannibalize its existing armor forcefulness. Germany today is incapable of rapidly deploying a single armored brigade from its barracks.

In 1988 the British Regular army of the Rhine (BAOR, representing the United Kingdom's NATO contingent in Europe) consisted of some 55,000 troops organized into a unmarried armored corps consisting of three armored divisions with eight brigades and supporting units. By 2021, this had dropped to just 72,500 troops in the unabridged British military, with no troops in mainland Europe. Moreover, the British are just capable of fielding two armored brigades, just one of which is capable of projecting ability in whatever meaningful capacity onto European soil in short discover.

Every other military in NATO has undergone similar reductions. Along with the drawdown in size came a like reduction in training, both in terms of scale and scope. Whereas REFORGER used to set up soldiers to fight multi-sectionalisation sized engagements using doctrine geared toward the employment of combined artillery operations, today NATO carries out battalion- and brigade-sized training which focuses on low-intensity conflict and "operations other than state of war" (i.e., peacekeeping, disaster response, etc.).

NATO today cannot fight a corps-sized appointment, even if it had a performance corps-sized unit of measurement fit for grooming. The fact of the matter is that NATO is a mere shadow of its former self, militarily neutered, and incapable of projecting power in any meaningful capacity.

Of grade, NATO wasn't the but European armed forces organization to undergo reduction and restructuring. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian military was in full disarray. In 1988, the Soviet military machine comprised some 5.five 1000000 personnel; by 1998, this number had dropped to around 1.5 million. Once configured to defeat NATO and occupy western Europe, past 1998 the Russian army was not able to conduct medium- or big-scale military machine exercises. Information technology had performed poorly in combat in Chechnya and had fumbled its internal reorganization then badly that its ability to project power was virtually zilch.

By 2000, things started to plough effectually. President Vladimir Putin had brought a semblance of purpose and discipline to Russian military machine service. Putin was motivated in part by the eastward expansion of NATO, which, despite the hope made to old Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO troops would non move "one inch" eastward in the case of German reunification, had causeless into its ranks not simply former Warsaw Pact nations, but also sometime Soviet Republics.

The Russian Regular army defeated a Chechen insurgency in the Second Chechen War (something the US military machine and NATO were unable to achieve in 20 years in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan) and performed well in both the Georgian-Russian War of 2008 and the Crimea operation in 2014. Moreover, largely in response to the eastward expansion of NATO, Russia reformed ii Cold War-era armed forces formations — the 1st Guards Tank Ground forces and the 20th Combined Arms Army — which specialized in the very kind of mobile, big-scale combined arms operations the United states of america military and NATO have forgotten how to fight.

Flexing its way out of a fight

Without projecting Russian intent, the reality is that the Russian military buildup in its western and southern military districts, when combined with the deployment of mobile forces in Belarus, represent a military power projection capability that is not but more than than capable of defeating Ukraine, but also NATO forces currently deployed on its eastern flank. The chances of such an all-out conventional-manner war may be extremely slim, but at that place is no doubting who holds the advantage here.

Later years of behaving like a teenager shadow boxing in the basement of his mother'south house, playing out the fantasy of knocking out Ivan Drago in the 1985 motion picture Rocky IV, the US and NATO detect themselves confronting the reality of the state of affairs they themselves created. Having picked a fight with Russia in the belief that it was not strong enough to pick upward the gauntlet, the trans-Atlantic brotherhood is now confronted with the reality that Ivan Drago is alive and well and standing in the band, ready to exercise boxing.

On screen, Rocky Four was an entertaining movie with (if you're an American) a satisfying ending. In the modernistic-day remake being contemplated past Joe Biden and NATO, Rocky Balboa is lilliputian more a effigy in their collective imagination. Rather than stride into the band and meet the challenge, all the US and NATO can exercise is go on to flex, hoping that somehow Russian federation volition be taken in by the barefaced and a pretense of power that merely no longer exists.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of SCORPION KING: America'southward Suicidal Encompass of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump. He served in the Soviet Wedlock as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf'southward staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

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Source: https://www.sott.net/article/463719-Scott-Ritter-America-couldnt-defend-Ukraine-even-if-it-wanted-to