Pentagon Pushes for Build-up in Europe against Russia
By Patrick Martin
Global Research
November 10, 2015
Top Pentagon generals are backing a plan for stepped-up rotation of American ground troops to Europe that would increase by 50 percent the US forces available to NATO in the event of a confrontation with Russia.
The plan was outlined at a defense forum at the Reagan Library in southern California that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter addressed on Saturdayafternoon, putting Russia and China on notice regarding the build-up of US military forces in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.
In comments reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday, both General Philip Breedlove, NATO commander, and General Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, confirmed the planned troop increase. The US military has two brigades on permanent station in Europe, totaling 7,000 soldiers, and the rotation plan would add a third brigade.
According to the Journal, General Milley proposed an even bigger build-up, saying he would like to add even more brigades to those rotating to Europe as well as “attack helicopter units, engineering teams and artillery brigades.” This would mean the effective doubling or tripling of the size of the US force deployed to Europe and available for NATO.
Many details of the rotation plan remain to be worked out, but Breedlove said decisions would be made “in the next couple of months.” Milley told the Journalthat the Army was changing its training methods to deal with what the Pentagon terms “hybrid war,” the combination of regular troops and irregular forces, as in the Russian operation in Crimea.
The Obama administration and the European Union have raised the alarm of alleged “hybrid war,” supposedly a new technique for seizing territory, to distract attention from their own aggressive intervention to overthrow the elected Yanukovych government in Ukraine in 2014 and replace it with a pro-NATO puppet regime.
The coup in Kiev, spearheaded by neo-fascist groups backed by the US State Department and CIA, sparked both the Russian intervention in Crimea—whose population is majority Russian and voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine—and the rebellion by pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukraine regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
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