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© David Turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
United States war machine personnel with an M16 rifle, guarding prisoners of war nearly the 5th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, during the Gulf War, at Male monarch Abdulaziz Air Base of operations in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 1991.

The Pentagon is in the process of preparing options for President Joe Biden regarding the deployment of US forces into NATO'southward eastern flank to seek to deter Russia from acting against Ukraine, or threatening NATO's easternmost members of Poland, Republic of latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

Some eight,500 US troops have been put on standby to be prepared to deploy to Europe on short detect. These are the Usa contingent of the NATO Response Strength, a multinational, 40,000-troop unit tasked with responding to aggression against member countries.

If the Usa wanted to practise more, it could deploy a few squadrons of Us Air Strength fighters, along with some other heavy armored brigade, whose equipment is prepositioned in Poland, and some support troops. It could also send 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Partitioning, which is tasked to "respond to crisis contingencies anywhere in the earth within 18 hours."

All these troops, however, fifty-fifty if assembled in amass, could not stand to a potential Russian adversary, for the unproblematic fact that none of these forces have trained to fight a mod combined arms conflict against a peer-level opponent. Putting troops and equipment on a battlefield is the easy function; having them perform to standard is harder, and having them execute doctrine that is no longer in vogue is impossible.

Joe Biden might recall he's flexing hard with this talk of military ability projection. All he is doing, however, is further underscoring the absolute dismal land of combat readiness that the US military finds itself in later 20 years of low-intensity conflict in a losing cause.

The time to have deployed 50,000 troops to Europe was in 2008, after the Russian-Georgian War, or 2014, after the Crimea crunch. Having fifty,000 well-armed The states troops refocused on the difficult job of fighting a sustained ground conflict in Europe might accept forced Russia to reconsider its options. Past because this option at present, all Biden is doing is proving the point that the US is a failing superpower, and NATO is lacking both purpose and drive.

A shadow of its erstwhile self

What a difference three decades makes. In 1990, the US Army in Europe (USAREUR) consisted of some 213,000 gainsay-ready forces organized into 2 Corps - V and VII - a Berlin Brigade, and the 3d Brigade of the 2d Armored Partitioning, deployed in northern Germany to protect the port of Hamburg. Each corps consisted of ane infantry sectionalization, one armored partitioning, and an armored cavalry regiment.

Through a plan known as Render of Forces to Frg (REFORGER), USAREUR could exist reinforced within x days by another three mechanized infantry divisions (1 of them Canadien) and ii armored brigades which would fill out V and Seven Corps to full strength, too as a 3rd corps (3 Corps) consisting of ii armored divisions, a mechanized infantry division, a cavalry regiment, and other corps-level troops.

These forces would fall in on prepositioned military stores warehoused and maintained to a level of constant readiness. Between the forces in Europe and those earmarked for deployment, USAREUR boasted a total gainsay capacity of over 550,000 troops which helped maintain the peace during America'south long Common cold State of war with the Soviet Union, which had around 600,000 troops stationed in eastern Europe, including 338,000 in East Germany lonely.

The potency of United states forces back then went on brandish in the war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's soldiers in 1991. USAREUR deployed a Corps Headquarters (the VII) along with 75,000 personnel, 1,200 tanks, 1,700 armored gainsay vehicles, more than than 650 pieces of artillery, and more 325 aircraft to the Farsi Gulf to back up Operation Desert Shield/Desert Tempest. A decade of intense combined arms warfare preparation in support of a new Air-Country Battle doctrine made the USAREUR forces the most combat capable units in the operation, helping vanquish the earth's fourth largest ground forces in a 100-hour ground combat operation that is unmatched in modern times.

After preserving the peace in Europe and winning a war in the Middle E, USAREUR was rewarded by existence unceremoniously tossed into the trash bin of history. In 1992, after the plummet of the Soviet Union, some lxx,000 soldiers redeployed to the continental U.s., part of a withdrawal that saw USAREUR compress to some 122,000 troops by the end of that year; 12 months later, it was down to some 62,000 soldiers. The Cold War, we were told, was over, and there was no longer a need to shoulder the expense of maintaining a standing force in readiness because, with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Matrimony, at that place would never again exist a big-scale ground war in Europe.

By 2008, the final remaining Corps-sized headquarters in USAREUR, V Corps, was rated equally the least valuable military nugget in the entire Us armed forces in terms of power projection capabilities.

Monkey meet, monkey do

The US wasn't the merely NATO power looking to cut costs in the mail service-Cold War era. In 1988 — a twelvemonth before the autumn of the Berlin Wall — the W German Army was looking at a reorganization scheme that would retain its construction of 12 divisions with 48 brigades, but reduce the manning levels from 95% to a 'cadre structure' of only 50%-lxx% that could be brought to total strength simply through the mobilization of reserves.

By 2020, the German Regular army, by now representing a unified country, had been reduced to little more 60,000 troops organized into two armored divisions of vi brigades, and ane rapid deployment division of 2 brigades. But even this reduced figure is misleading - to deploy a gainsay-capable battalion-sized armored strength to the Baltics as role of NATO's 'battlegroup' concept, Germany has to cannibalize its existing armor force. Germany today is incapable of rapidly deploying a single armored brigade from its billet.

In 1988 the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR, representing the United Kingdom'southward NATO contingent in Europe) consisted of some 55,000 troops organized into a single armored corps consisting of three armored divisions with eight brigades and supporting units. By 2021, this had dropped to just 72,500 troops in the entire British military, with no troops in mainland Europe. Moreover, the British are only capable of fielding two armored brigades, simply one of which is capable of projecting power in whatsoever meaningful chapters onto European soil in brusk notice.

Every other war machine in NATO has undergone similar reductions. Forth with the drawdown in size came a similar reduction in preparation, both in terms of scale and scope. Whereas REFORGER used to set up soldiers to fight multi-division sized engagements using doctrine geared toward the employment of combined arms operations, today NATO carries out battalion- and brigade-sized training which focuses on low-intensity conflict and "operations other than war" (i.due east., peacekeeping, disaster response, etc.).

NATO today cannot fight a corps-sized appointment, even if information technology had a functioning corps-sized unit fit for training. The fact of the matter is that NATO is a mere shadow of its sometime self, militarily neutered, and incapable of projecting power in any meaningful capacity.

Of grade, NATO wasn't the merely European war machine organisation to undergo reduction and restructuring. With the dissolution of the Soviet Wedlock in 1991, the Russian military was in total disarray. In 1988, the Soviet military comprised some 5.v million personnel; by 1998, this number had dropped to around 1.5 million. Once configured to defeat NATO and occupy western Europe, by 1998 the Russian ground forces was not able to conduct medium- or large-calibration military exercises. It had performed poorly in gainsay in Chechnya and had fumbled its internal reorganization so badly that its ability to project ability was virtually nil.

By 2000, things started to turn around. President Vladimir Putin had brought a semblance of purpose and discipline to Russian war machine service. Putin was motivated in part by the eastward expansion of NATO, which, despite the promise made to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO troops would non move "one inch" eastward in the case of German reunification, had causeless into its ranks non only former Warsaw Pact nations, but besides former Soviet Republics.

The Russian Army defeated a Chechen insurgency in the Second Chechen War (something the Us armed forces and NATO were unable to accomplish in 20 years in Afghanistan) and performed well in both the Georgian-Russian State of war of 2008 and the Crimea operation in 2014. Moreover, largely in response to the e expansion of NATO, Russia reformed two Common cold State of war-era armed forces formations — the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army — which specialized in the very kind of mobile, big-scale combined artillery operations the The states military and NATO accept forgotten how to fight.

Flexing its way out of a fight

Without projecting Russian intent, the reality is that the Russian military machine buildup in its western and southern armed forces districts, when combined with the deployment of mobile forces in Belarus, stand for a military power projection capability that is not only more than than capable of defeating Ukraine, but besides NATO forces currently deployed on its eastern flank. The chances of such an all-out conventional-fashion war may be extremely slim, but there is no doubting who holds the advantage here.

Subsequently years of behaving like a teenager shadow boxing in the basement of his mother'south business firm, playing out the fantasy of knocking out Ivan Drago in the 1985 movie Rocky IV, the US and NATO find themselves confronting the reality of the state of affairs they themselves created. Having picked a fight with Russia in the belief that it was not strong plenty to pick upwardly the gauntlet, the trans-Atlantic alliance is now confronted with the reality that Ivan Drago is alive and well and standing in the ring, ready to do boxing.

On screen, Rocky IV was an entertaining movie with (if you're an American) a satisfying ending. In the modern-day remake being contemplated by Joe Biden and NATO, Rocky Balboa is little more than a figure in their collective imagination. Rather than pace into the ring and see the challenge, all the U.s. and NATO can do is continue to flex, hoping that somehow Russia volition be taken in by the bluff and a pretense of power that simply no longer exists.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officeholder and author of SCORPION KING: America'due south Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump. He served in the Soviet Spousal relationship every bit an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a United nations weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter