For NATO, 2024 will be the year of Steadfast Defender. The most important military exercise ever organized on European soil in forty years. Ukraine has brutally reminded Europeans that a conflict with Russia is possible, and that it is even a credible scenario within five to eight years, Boris Pistorius declared a few days ago, German Minister of Defense. NATO is therefore showing its muscles with this XXL military exercise.
The chosen scenario: facing an opponent of equivalent size. The NATO general staff states it bluntly: “ We stand ready for a Russian attack… “. The maneuver: NATO troops will train to reach the Eastern European flank, Poland and in particular the Baltic countries as quickly as possible. The exercise will also take place around the Baltic Sea, in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
An exercise that has everything strategic signaling » says Guillaume Garnier, NATO specialist at the French Institute of International Relations. “ Any exercise of this magnitude necessarily involves a strategic signaling dimension. That is to say something is said to the potential adversary. Steadfast Defender is still 90 000 men who will be affected by this exercise. Exercise which runs from February to May. So it’s a fairly considerable mass. To give you an order of magnitude, the previous edition, in 2021, brought together 9 000 men. We are still on a large-scale exercise and necessarily, there is strategic signaling, which concretely means that we are demonstrating to Russia that we are determined to defend the European continent if necessary. », he explains.
Exceptional logistics
With Steadfast Defender, NATO will therefore revise its ranges and its projection capacity, by deploying 90,000 soldiers, fifty warships and more than 1,000 armored vehicles. The entry of American troops onto European soil will be via Belgian ports. Large-scale logistics in which the US Army excels, indicates Guillaume Garnier: “ It is also the strong point of the American armies, this skill of strategic projection, that is to say to move a large group of forces, of units to the four corners of the planet and with the required speed. It also allows the United States to reiterate this point, if necessary. At this level of equipment, skills, know-how, only the Americans, obviously, can afford it. “.
A communications war
In reality, this giant exercise will oversee all of the training planned this year by NATO, but this time the Alliance is returning to the major maneuvers of the Cold War. The last one of such importance for NATO was in 1988, just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moscow will therefore not be able to remain inert in the face of such a deployment of forces on its borders, underlines Guillaume Garnier: “ They will respond, at least in terms of communication strategy, to messages that are delivered through intermediary media. It’s something that needs to be planned and carefully calibrated. So there will be a narrative, a Russian speech in response and given the scale of this exercise, probably they will use the theme of provocation. And we, for our part, the allies, will also have a communication strategy to explain the goals of the exercise, the expected ».
The Russian army is also accustomed to these large-scale exercises, referred to as Zapad, they take place every four years and the last one in 2021 brought together 200,000 soldiers. But one question remains unanswered: does the Russian general staff still have the means to organize such maneuvers, while most of its troops are waging war in Ukraine?
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