NATO to replicate Biennial Indian Corps level exercises, biggest in decades
Indian Army quietly holds a biennial Corps level exercise involving more than 75000 troops in the deserts of Rajasthan or plains of Punjab. Now NATO too will launch its biggest military exercises in decades next week with around 90,000 personnel set to take part in months of drills aimed at showing the alliance can defend all of its territory up to its border with Russia, top officers said Thursday.
Well this figure of 90000 reminds one of 1971 War of Liberation of Bangladesh where around 90000 Pakistani soldiers had surrendered to the Indian Army.
The exercises come as in spite of all help and egging extended to Ukraine its conflict with giant neighbour Russia has bogged down. NATO as an organization is not directly involved in the conflict, except to supply Kyiv with all kinds of non-nuclear support, although many member countries send weapons and ammunition individually or in groups, and provide military training.
In the months before Russian troops were ordered into Ukraine in February 2022 to stop NATO ‘s usurping Ukraine in its bear hug, NATO had begun beefing up security on its eastern flank with Russia and Ukraine. It’s the alliance’s biggest build-up since the Cold War. The war games are meant to deter Russia from targeting a member country.
The exercises — dubbed Steadfast Defender 24 – “will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometres (miles), from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any condition,” the 31-nation organization said.
Troops will be moving to and through Europe until the end of May in what NATO describes as “a simulated emerging conflict scenario with a near-peer adversary.” Under NATO’s new defence plans, its chief adversaries are Russia and non-state terrorist organizations.
“The alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via transatlantic movement of forces from North America,” NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, told reporters.
Cavoli said it will demonstrate “our unity, our strength, and our determination to protect each other.”
The chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said that it’s “a record number of troops that we can bring to bear and have an exercise within that size, across the alliance, across the ocean from the U.S. to Europe.”
Bauer described it as “a big change” compared to troop numbers exercising just a year ago. Sweden, which is expected to join NATO this year, will also take part.
U.K. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has said that the government in London would send 20,000 troops backed by advanced fighter jets, surveillance planes, warships and submarines, with many being deployed in Eastern Europe from February to June.
