U.S. to Deploy Heavy Weapons Near Russia

Date: 24 June 2015 - 21:34

News ID: ۱۵۳۸۳

ASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The Pentagon chief says the United States will deploy heavy military equipment in several Eastern European countries to boost NATO presence there, amid standoff with Russia over Ukraine.
Speaking at a joint press conference with three Baltic defense ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Washington will spread about 250 tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment across seven European nations.
"We will temporarily stage one armored brigade combat team's vehicles and associated equipment in countries in central and eastern Europe," Carter said.
"This pre-positioned European activity set includes tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery," he said.
Carter added that Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland had "agreed to host company- to battalion-sized elements of this equipment" which would be "moved around the region for training and exercises".
He said the move is to reassure NATO states against "threats” from Russia and terrorist groups.
His comments came a day after he announced that the U.S. would be contributing weapons, aircraft and forces for NATO’s new rapid reaction force.
According to the Associated Press, the contribution will consist of intelligence and surveillance capabilities, special operations forces, logistical aid, transport aircraft, and a range of weapons.
This is the first time since the end of the Cold War that Washington stations heavy military equipment in newer NATO members.
Military tensions between the United States and Russia have escalated steadily since April 2014, when the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea reunited with the Russian Federation following a referendum a month earlier.
Washington accuses Moscow of arming and supporting pro-Russian forces fighting in the predominantly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine. Moscow calls the accusations "groundless".
The U.S.-led military buildup in NATO member states bordering Russia has drawn strong objections from Moscow, followed by warnings of a well-measured response.
The United States plans to bolster its armored presence and keep rotations of American troops in Eastern Europe to provide "deterrence against Russian aggression”.

Anti-China Funding

Speaking at the conference for the China Aerospace Studies Initiative, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work pushed for more U.S. military spending on weapons research, saying that the Chinese air force is rapidly catching up with its American counterpart in capabilities.
Work described China as a rising power, and insisted that interaction with the U.S., an established power, would likely eventually result in war, saying the U.S. has historically relied on its technological superiority and massive nuclear arsenal as a "hedge” against China.
With the technological gap getting narrower, the huge nuclear arsenal apparently isn’t enough to cut it anymore, and Work urged the U.S. to spend up ways to get that technological superiority back in place, putting particular emphasis on laser weaponry.
Work noted that directed energy weapons could theoretically knock expensive missiles out of the sky for a fraction of what the missiles themselves cost. That’s all true, of course, but exactly how much the Pentagon will spend on getting such weapons working in the first place is unclear, and the Pentagon, as ever, simply wants to fund everything in the hopes that some of that stuff will work out.

NATO to Return to Iraq

Hope springs eternal for NATO officials confident of their ability to create strong militaries in the Western style across the world with training missions, and this week’s NATO summit is expected to unveil their next training target as Iraq.
NATO has plenty of experience training Iraq’s military to a point they are contented with, having left in 2011 after years of training top Iraqi officers, only to watch that Iraqi military collapse in the face of ISIL opposition, with the very same top officers accused of abandoning their posts more or less immediately.
The U.S. and Britain have already sent troops back into Iraq to launch a training operation aimed at "reforming” a military that they’d only just finished creating a few years prior, and are hoping, given how poorly the recent effort is going, that more NATO members would be the solution.
With NATO slowly reducing its presence in Afghanistan, it is only natural they’d be looking for new missions to justify their continued existence, and recent predictions of a Russian invasion haven’t exactly panned out, leaving Iraq the most convenient target.