News Analysis
The exercise is known as Steadfast Defender 2024.
According to NATO’s leadership, the initiative was conceived to simulate what the alliance might do if faced with an attack by the Russian Federation against one of its member countries.
Under Article 5 of the terms of the alliance, if any member nation comes under military attack must respond in the defense of that member nation. Such an attack has never happened since the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on April 4, 1949, but NATO members have certainly attacked other nations with impunity and NATO continues to wage war against Russia through Ukraine.
At its founding, NATO was comprised of just 12 member states: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It has since expanded substantially, now encompassing 31 member nations.
It did so in direct violation of agreements made with the Soviet bloc when that entity dissolved while Mikhail Gorbachev served as its last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1991. Those agreements stipulated that the Soviet Union would retrench, releasing various fledgling Warsaw Pact nations to become independent, under an agreement that NATO would not expand further eastward. NATO not only ignored the agreement by bringing under its wing many of the former members of the Soviet Union but also by deploying NATO units and military forces far closer to Russia than ever before.
The western powers’ breach of those agreements is widely seen as one of the primary triggers which caused Russian President Vladimir Putin to push back against NATO by invading Ukraine in February 2022. That was just as NATO was actively considering adding Ukraine as one of its newest members. Another provocation was the Nazification of Ukraine and sustained attacks on ethnic Russians living in Ukraine designed to resonate with the deep trauma Russia experienced as a result of attacks from Nazi Germany during WW II. Russians rightly hates and fear Nazis and the rise of Nazi ideology and symbology and attacks on peaceful Russians was a NATO psyop intended to provoke a response from Russia.
With its latest mass military exercise maneuver, NATO could ironically be tempting fate again, by demonstrating not so much its large-scale abilities to defend itself against a perceived threat, but instead by proving to Russia how right it was in the first place to attempt to secure Ukraine as a buffer state against NATO aggression.
Based on what Brussels has already revealed about the plans for the new military exercises, the scale of Steadfast Defender 2024 is immense. The plans call for all 31 current member nations to be a part of it, plus observer and NATO accession candidate Sweden. Over 90,000 troops, an estimated 1,100 combat vehicles, plus over 80 fighter jets, drones, and helicopters will be engaged, in activities expected to last through May 2024.
As might be expected with a war simulation of this scope, individual nations are leading their own parts of the exercises.
Poland, for example, will be carrying out a maneuver called Dragon 24. Running from February 25 through March 14. Its part of the exercises will be mostly focused on ground defense. It will feature its 11 Dywizja Kawalerii Pancernej and 16 Pomorska Dywizja Zmechanizovana divisions as lead actors for this effort. It will utilize U.S.-built M1 Abrams tanks, South Korean made K2 Black Panther tanks, the South Korean K239 Chunmoo mobile artillery system, the Polish-designed AHS Krab mobile 155 howitzer, the South Korean K9 Thunder mobile howitzer, and U.S. Army’s M142 High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), as part of a force including 3,500 vehicles, many of which are configured for difficult terrain and winter weather. Poland will be deploying 15,000 of its troops for this part of the drills.
Besides supporting other countries’ lead activities, the German Bundeswehr, the armed forces equivalent of the U.S. Department of Defense, will be running its Quadriga 2024 maneuvers as part of the joint NATO drills. As its name implies, it involves four separate war games and military force movements to be carried out between next month and May 2024. Its Grand Center phase runs from mid-February through the end of February, with the name relating to geographically where the exercise will take place within Germany. The other three phases are Grand North, which runs from mid-February through mid-March; Grand South running from late April into May; and Grand Quadriga, which involves all groups within the country and takes place in May.
The United Kingdom announced it plans to provide 20,000 of its military forces to support the joint military drills over the next three months.
It has also been revealed the NATO drills will include Nordic Response 24 from the alliance’s northern nations.
Three other NATO maneuvers have also been identified with yet unspecified nations participating. Those include Immediate Response 24, Swift Response 24, and Saber Strike 24.
General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, summarized the public rationale for the mass war games and what they will involve, during a press briefing held on January 18 in which NATO officially announced Steadfast Defender 2024. The press briefing was carried out in conjunction with the NATO Military Committee in Chiefs of Defense Session held from January 17-18, 2024, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
It began, he said, with the heads of state for each NATO member state governments’ approval of regional military deployment plans for NATO last summer. Those approvals “gave us the green light to continue with all aspects of modernizing our collective defense systems”, he told his audience.
Those summer 2023 sessions also including redefining NATO’s enemies as far more than just Russia. Its official charter now reads as defining the enemies it is defending itself against are Russia and “terrorist” organizations. That appears to open NATO’s charter up to include perhaps going after Iran, Yemen, China, and North Korea as part of this significantly broadened charter.
“For the first time in 30 years,” Cavoli said, “we have the strategy – deterrence and defense of the Euro-Atlantic area – and we have the plans to make the Alliance fit for the purpose of collective territorial defense.”
“We are now in the process of making our plans executable,” he went on. “This means making sure we have the force commitments, command and control arrangements, and the enablement our plans require.”
“We also need to rehearse and refine our plans through rigorous training and exercises,” General Cavoli explained.
“The Alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America,” he said. “This reinforcement will occur during a simulated emerging conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary.”
In a separate written announcement, the NATO alliance said Steadfast 24 “will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometers (miles), from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any condition”.
Russia responded with its own assessment of what Steadfast Defender 2024 was about.
"These exercises are another element of the hybrid war unleashed by the West against Russia," said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko during an interview with the Russian state-owned news agency RIA.
The interview was published on January 21.
“An exercise of this scale ... marks the final and irrevocable return of NATO to the Cold War schemes, when the military planning process, resources and infrastructure are being prepared for confrontation with Russia," Grushko continued.
It might be true the upcoming joint military exercises will provide the opportunity to iron out some of the challenges of pulling together the collective military might of 31 nations if challenged. It is of such a scale that there would be no choice but to announce it, to avoid the appearance that NATO was perhaps about to declare war on Russia soon.
What isn't true is that Russia poses any type of threat to Europe. Russia has consistently called for peace and gave NATO ample opportunities to avoid the war in Ukraine. It has also repeatedly offered a road map to peace in Ukraine. NATO has responded only with hostility and continued to expand the attacks against Russia.
Some NATO members, such as the U.S. and UK, are nations of war ruled by war profiteering oligarchs. They manufacture conflict to support the looting by their oligarchs. The U.S. Pentagon can't or won't account for more than $10 trillion in taxpayer money it received and has never passed an audit. The UK, France and Germany have war industries that profit from arms sales.
Most of the oligarchs who profit from war are also members of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which held its annual meeting last week to discuss and execute the plans of evil billionaires. One of WEF's primary goals is the substantial reduction of the human population. War is just one of the means it uses and the evidence suggests that it is trying to ignite a world war.
NATO could easily negotiate peace with Russia, but it has made it clear it doesn't want peace. Steadfast Defender 2024 is a clear signal that it wants more war. What it doesn't seem to understand is that it can't win a war with Russia and its allies.