All thirty-one NATO countries plus Sweden are reportedly gearing up to conduct the bloc's biggest military drills since the Cold War in early 2024. Sputnik reached out to Michael Maloof, a former security policy analyst with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to get a sense of the risks posed by the exercises.
British business media reported Monday that NATO plans to hold large-scale exercises across Germany, Poland and the Baltic countries between February and March of 2024, with the drills' pretext being to practice "repelling Russian aggression" against allies. The drills, dubbed Steadfast Defender 24, are set to involve up to 41,000 troops, 50 warships, and to feature between 500-700 air combat missions, according to sources familiar with the plans.
The exercises are the first of their kind since 2021, with the alliance previously mostly avoiding large-scale exercises in Russia's direct vicinity amid concerns about Moscow’s possible reaction amid repeated warnings by Russian Foreign Intelligence that some NATO countries may be preparing to transform the Ukrainian proxy conflict into a direct shooting war with Russia.
The drills are "designed to put Russia and allies in the most unfavorable position," former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof told Sputnik.
Pointing to the exercises' expected heavy focus on air power, something Ukraine has lacked utterly throughout its three-month long counteroffensive this summer, Maloof emphasized that the drills appear aimed at going "from being reactionary in terms of reacting to a crisis, to actually going on a war footing" on NATO's part, "assuming that there’s an invasion, and that Russia has allies participating."
The exercises will be meant to "show coordination on a wartime footing," the observer said, and NATO will likely use experience gained by observing fighting in Ukraine to "coordinate their air, sea, land, but also their space and cyber capabilities together."
"That said," Maloof noted, "the reality is" that much of NATO's stocks of war materiel "have been depleted because of Ukraine," with Europe and the United States each running low on weapons and ammunition after sending nearly $100 billion in arms assistance to Kiev over the past 18 months.
"If, in fact, there was a war, Russia would certainly activate ships and other aircraft and what have you in international waters and perhaps off the coast of the United States to deal with" US attempts to set up a logistical supply train across the Atlantic.
The observer doesn’t believe that the alliance is “really ready for a real confrontation and real head-on war” with Russia, with any conflagration certain to result in “tremendous losses.”
"Russia would certainly engaged its hypersonics, its hypersonic missiles, which would only take just a few minutes to get to European cities” with little if any warning time, Maloof emphasized.
“So [NATO] can show off their exercises, their bravado, and certainly Moscow can learn from them, how they might integrate their air, land, sea along with the their cyber capabilities),” he said.
Otherwise, if Russia was ever attacked directly on the ground by the Western bloc, Maloof predicts that nukes would begin to go of very quickly, given the warnings outlined in Russia's nuclear doctrine about Moscow's potential response to powerful conventional attacks which threaten the existence of the state.
"The last thing Europe needs is a war against Russia," the observer stressed, pointing out that even just the proxy war in Ukraine, in which Western countries have shed no blood, has turned into a real "disaster" for Washington’s overseas allies, causing their economies to plummet and setting back living standards at least a decade.
"Their (weapons) stocks are not up. The industries are down. And even if they wanted to get their industries up and running, they'd have to switch over to wartime production. And that would assume that you have adequate oil and gas. They don’t. This winter is going to be a really tell-tale moment for Europe on just what they can achieve realistically, as opposed to their pipe dreams and the military exercises that they conduct," Maloof summed up.
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