NATO today launched its biggest single military exercise in more than 13 years, involving some 36,000 troops in the Mediterranean Sea, simulating a war spanning from Sicily to Spain and Portugal against a major invading European superpower, who officials are insisting is definitely totally not Russia.
The exercise is planned to last through November 6 and will focus on support a “Spearhead Force” that NATO intends to install along the Russian border, nominally to fend off a Russian invasion of Eastern Europe. The predictions of a Russian invasion have been growing out of NATO for a couple of years, and have justified significant increases in spending and military deployments into otherwise calm nations in the east.
The exercise is also going to involve “hybrid warfare” and challenging officers with Internet “propaganda” involving manipulated pictures and false intelligence, claiming to center on “lessons learned” during the 14-year-plus occupation of Afghanistan.
In addition to the NATO nations, 7 non-member nations will be participating in the exercise. Noteworthy among these is Ukraine, which predicts a full-scale global war with Russia seemingly on a weekly basis, and has ambitions to join the alliance.
What NATO is trying to do is to advertise for himself yet to get more European country's that are not NATO members to become a full member, like Sweden. Swedish new generals and some political parties politicians are for Sweden to become a ful member of NATO, so as smaller nations that are not.
More of NATO membership closer to war with Russia, that's the new head of NATO political agenda.
"… have justified significant increases in spending."
That's all you have to know.
A “Spearhead Force” that would literally be vaporized with the Russian military's nuclear tipped cruise missiles within just a few seconds of any US-Russian war. I wonder if the enlistees who are stationed in Europe and who will comprise this "force" understand what their idiot superiors and leaders are setting them up for? Of course, the answer is obvious. Their puny brains are too filled with patriotic slogans and propaganda for them to even think rationally.
Clearly, Putin couldn't invade any other European country from the Mediterranean. Russia has no access to the Med and an amphibious operation there would be totally daft (it would have to be run from Murmansk!!!). What's probably going on is that NATO doesn't want to be left out of the ongoing EU efforts to ward off migrants. Some sort of beefed-up EU coast guard force seems to be on the cards and NATO wants to show that it is an important part of Europe's defence arrangements. Since Putin seems to be scared silly of using his rickety conscript army to invade even Ukraine, the chances of a Russian ground attack in the east seem remote but that may also be precisely because NATO has beefed up its forces in the Baltic. Short of a palace coup in Moscow, I don't see how Putin can be taken out other than by war. That's the lesson of European history and I think more and more people are starting to see things that way. In the run-up to WWI, there was a similar sense of inevitability from the second Moroccan crisis in 1911 onward. As for internet propaganda, the best way to become immune to it is to do what I have been doing for several years: trawl through the American internet every day. The propaganda is so flat-footed and laid on so thick that no one could possibly be fooled and it's a great way to identify the propaganda techniques used, which keep popping up again and again.