Military Madness > NATO Has Switched to War Footing With Russia - Newsweek

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NATO Has Switched to War Footing With Russia

BY BRENDAN COLE, Newsweek

ON 6/13/23 AT 3:00 AM EDT

Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has spurred NATO members to plan in detail what has been unthinkable since the end of the Cold War—a direct conflict with Russia.

However, ahead of the bloc's summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, starting on July 11 when countering Russia will be top of the agenda, Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said NATO was not ready for a war with Moscow.

How can that be when they have been pushing for one since the Maidan coup?

"It needs a real kick up the backside," he told Newsweek, as he took aim at dwindling military budgets across alliance members, although there are exceptions, such as Poland.

"There is a massive war going on in Eastern Europe. It's a land war and it's an air war, and so you need to invest in air and land, and that hasn't been done," Shirreff said. "Last year at its Madrid summit, (Alliance Secretary General) Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO would ramp up its very high readiness forces to 300,000—that simply hasn't happened."

Polish soldiers hold a NATO flag after a training demonstration with the NATO multinational battle group eFPon at the Orzysz training ground on July 03, 2022 in Orzysz, Poland. The alliance will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania on July 11, 2023 to outline plans for a war with Russia.

GETTY IMAGES/OMAR MARQUES

The former British general said that the U.K. Army was an example of such cuts across the bloc being run down to a "ludicrous size" as he believed that the defense establishment had believed that China, not Russia, was the major long-term threat.

"Geography matters here and Russia is the wolf nearest the sledge," said Shirreff, the managing partner at the consultancy Strategia Worldwide. He believed there has been a "failure of deterrence" by the alliance, which missed an opportunity to build up capability after Putin seized Crimea in 2014.

Which was after NATO seized Ukraine with the Maidan coup leaving Russia's naval base at Sevastopol, Crimea, in great danger. Russia 'seized' Crimea without firing a shot and with the full compliance of the Crimean people.

"Am I confident that NATO will really be able to generate conventional forces ready for a conventional war with Russia? No, I'm not."

Even if the Kremlin and Russian state media say that the war is already a proxy one between Moscow and NATO, the alliance has taken pains to avoid a direct role in the fighting, instead providing Ukraine with equipment to take on Moscow's aggression.

But one of NATO's top officials, Admiral Rob Bauer, said in May that the alliance had to prepare for the fact "that conflict can present itself at any time," directly with Moscow, Reuters reported.

This is why NATO will examine thousands of pages of classified documents outlining regional plans and guidance on how members can upgrade their forces and logistics in the most detailed plans since the end of the Cold War.

The plans also entail assigning troops to defend different regions and gives details on "where, what and how to deploy," Stoltenberg said last month, according to Reuters. This will build on the process spurred by the annexation of Crimea after which Western allies deployed combat troops to eastern Europe.

What will be discussed at the summit "looks like due diligence to back up what NATO has been preparing and doing anyway," Rose Gottemoeller, the former deputy secretary general of the alliance told Newsweek.

NATO Battle Groups

In March, Stoltenberg announced the alliance would deploy four new battle groups, each with around 1,500 troops, across Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

Stoltenberg said the aim would be to "strengthen NATO's posture in all domains with major increases of forces in the eastern part of the alliance, on land, in the air, and at sea." NATO already has battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

The point here, as with most wars in the past hundred years, is to make money on the manufacture and sales of military equipment. NATO and the Pentagon's skillful finessing of drawing Putin into invading Ukraine, and the subsequent super-expansion of NATO into Russian-border countries, forces those NATO countries to increase their military budgets enriching the war-mongering oligarchs of the NATO alliance, all of which are too stupid to see what is really happening.

There is more on this article in Newsweek.

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