NATO launches its largest exercise since the Cold War
On Monday, January 22, the North Atlantic Alliance begins its largest four-month military exercise in decades, Steadfast Defender 2024, which will simulate a conflict with a “virtually equal adversary.”
The exercise will involve about 90 thousand people, DW reports.
It will be attended by all NATO countries and a candidate country for membership in the Alliance – Sweden. The maneuvers, which will last until the end of May, will cover European territory from Norway to Romania. According to the dpa news agency, the scenario of the Steadfast Defender maneuvers is a Russian attack on the territory of allies, which triggers Article Five of the NATO collective defense treaty.
So far, the largest maneuvers of recent decades have been Trident Juncture, in which more than 50,000 military personnel took part in 2018. The last such NATO exercise was held in 1988, involving more than 125,000 soldiers.
Steadfast Defender 2024 will also feature more than 50 ships – from aircraft carriers to destroyers, as well as more than 80 fighters, helicopters and drones and at least 1,100 combat vehicles, including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles. According to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli, the exercise will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex operations on land, sea, air, cyberspace and space “for months, over thousands of kilometers, from the Far North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in all conditions.
According to the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer, this scale of the exercise is a demonstration of the Alliance’s new readiness. “It’s a record number of troops that we can deploy and exercise on this scale, across the Alliance, across the ocean, from the United States to Europe,” he said. In addition, the head of the Military Committee emphasized that war is not only a matter for the military: “When it comes to war, as we see in Ukraine, it affects the whole society.”
