U.S. Army Europe has rescheduled an exercise designed to show America’s land force power to reinforce Europe if attacked that was delayed because of the coronavirus, signaling that readiness to deter Russian aggression will find new forms amid the pandemic.
The Allied Spirit exercise, with a combined 6,000 U.S. and Polish soldiers, will take place at the Drawsko Pomorskie training area in northwest Poland June 5-19 in a modified format, one of several delayed exercises that had been part of Defender Europe 20.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Comdr. Adm. James Stavridis said last week that large-scale exercises like Defender, which had envisioned more than 20,000 troops training with more than a dozen countries across the European continent, will have to be conducted in a “smaller bite” moving forward.
“Militaries are good at adaption and finding new ways of doing business,” Stavridis said at a virtual discussion hosted by the Washington-based Turkish Heritage Organization.
“Instead of doing a massive, high-troop strength kind of exercise, I think we are going to have to break down our military activity into smaller, more manageable bites,” he said, highlighting how the upcoming exercise in Poland is a good example.
Stavridis, who was NATO commander from 2009 to 2013, said the recent deployment of a U.S. and British flotilla to conduct exercises in the Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle was another example of small but effective exercising.
“Instead of huge carrier strike groups operating together, we’re going to do smaller but still very important deployments of our warships,” he said.
Aerial exercises may include more unmanned aerial vehicles instead of bombers, he added.
“I think you’re going to see smaller exercises doing discrete tasks such as surveillance over the Mediterranean Sea,” he said. “It’s going to be smaller. It’s going to be more beautiful moving forward at least for a period of time.”
Smaller exercises lack large-scale test
The Defender Europe 20 exercises had been billed as the largest deployment of U.S.-based forces in Europe in more than a quarter century, involving 20,000 service members operating with NATO and partner militaries across the continent, until the coronavirus struck and a stop-movement order was imposed by the Pentagon on March 13.
U.S. European Command had earmarked more than $600 million for exercises in fiscal year 2020. More than 6,000 troops had already arrived, and 3,000 pieces of equipment had been offloaded at ports in Germany and the Netherlands before the stop-movement order took effect.
Military analyst Wojciech Lorenz of the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw said the Defender 20 exercises were of strategic importance: They were the first time since 1993 that the United States had planned to deploy a division-sized force from the U.S. or Europe.
“It would be a very strong demonstration of the willingness of the U.S. to defend its allies,” he told the Washington Examiner.
From a practical standpoint, Lorenz said the exercises were meant to test the readiness of U.S. troops and logistics as well as the European infrastructure that the U.S. has invested billions of dollars into in the years since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
“The so-called military mobility is hugely important because Russia is able to use, for example, a large exercise as a cover for offensive operation, and NATO with U.S. needs to be able to deploy troops as fast as possible to a threatened or attacked state,” Lorenz explained.
“You need to be able to use big units if you take seriously the defense against Russia, which has been forming its land troops into divisions and armies for some time,” he added.
The reduction of troops from 20,000 to 6,000 is unfortunate, Lorenz explained, because practicing the smaller number has been done since heel-to-toe rotations of a heavy brigade to Europe began in 2017.
“The benefits are smaller than [they] could be,” he said.
The U.S. and Polish troops will train collective defense scenarios in Poland, including a river crossing, a necessary scenario if an adversary destroys infrastructure like bridges.
“This is very important because when you have a defensive strategy based on the ability to reinforce, you need to be able to move troops to the region when the conflict is already ongoing,” he said.
U.S. EUCOM plans to reschedule additional exercises over the next few months in a modified format to continue the readiness training to improve interoperability with allies in the region.
