Coronavirus Forces Pentagon to Limit Operations

NATO exercises in Europe increasingly scaled down

The US military is no stranger to having to adapt to a crisis in one of the countries they are deployed within. Coronavirus is a bigger matter, however, because it’s not just some countries, but all of them, and the military is trying to adapt everywhere.

In Iraq, this has meant cutting off training to avoid large crowds. In Afghanistan, recent deployments are being quarantined to avoid exposing the existing troops to anything. In Europe, a major NATO drill is being repeatedly scaled back.

Before the crisis, the NATO exercise was meant to be the biggest US deployment in Europe in years, and has been revised several times since, reducing the number of troops and some of the things they were going to do.

US officials are downplaying the seriousness of having to scale back all of these exercises, saying that they learned important lessons.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.