MOSCOW, May 26 (RIA Novosti), Rick Rozoff - U.S. Army Europe is currently conducting a fifteen-nation, 4,000-troop military exercise at the Hohenfels Training Area in Germany, at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in that Bavarian city.
The war games, code-named Combined Resolve-II, involve military personnel from thirteen European nations and one pseudo-nation, Kosovo.
All fifteen parties involved were identified on NATO's Allied Command Operations website as NATO allies (members) and partners (prospective members) "training for future operations."
This is perhaps the first time that the 28-nation, U.S.-controlled military bloc has acknowledged Kosovo as an alliance partner, although the latter's fledgling army, the Kosovo Security Force, was created by NATO's Kosovo Force (KFOR) and has been trained and provided with arms, armored vehicles and even uniforms by NATO as a whole and by respective member states of the bloc.
One of the other NATO partners, a member of the bloc's Partnership for Peace program which has been used to prepare all twelve post-Cold War alliance members for accession, is Serbia - the nation that NATO wrested Kosovo from fifteen years ago after an overpowering 78-day air war against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia of which Serbia was the core.
In addition to the U.S., Kosovo and Serbia, the other participating countries are NATO stalwarts France and Belgium, new NATO members in Eastern Europe - Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovenia - and Partnership for Peace members Austria and Georgia.
The NATO account of the event reiterates a theme commonly addressed over the past eighteen or so months: that with the drawdown of troops from no fewer than fifty NATO member and partner states in Afghanistan, the bloc's new integrated, combat-melded global military force - trained and hardened by over twenty years of war and post-war deployments in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Iraq (only partially acknowledged as a NATO operation), Libya and the Horn of Africa - is now being used by the U.S. for use in Europe.
The most significant paragraph of the NATO account of Combined Resolve-II (which includes the use of "cutting edge battlefield simulation equipment") cited above states:
"NATO and many Allied and Partnered nations have served most recently in Afghanistan and trained together for many years to develop and refine their standard operating procedures. Training on the scale of Combined Resolve-II allows these nations to test these standard operating procedures in near combat like scenarios."
The website of the Joint Multinational Readiness Center offers an intriguing history of the Pentagon's Hohenfels Training Area, one that is surely pertinent to contemporary developments.
The training area was established by the Nazi German Wehrmacht in 1938, the year before Berlin's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II in Europe.
In 1951 it passed into the hands of the American armed forces, which employed (and doubtlessly expanded and modernized) it exclusively until 1956. With the U.S. and NATO allies assisting in the formation of a new German army, the Bundeswehr, in West Germany in 1955 and its immediate incorporation into NATO (thereby provoking the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies to found the Warsaw Pact) , U.S. military personnel at the Hohenfels Training Area were joined by West German forces and the facility was used by NATO nations until 1988 under the name of the Combat Maneuver Training Center.
Toward the end of 2005 the latter was renamed the Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC), which transformation, in the words of its website, "leverages the unique capability of the JMRC to train U.S. forces for joint and multinational coalition warfare" and "provides the best opportunity for U.S. Forces to train with their coalition partners prior to joining them in combat."
The site reports that over 60,000 U.S., NATO and NATO partnership forces are trained for the above purpose each year.
Stage two of Washington's use of NATO to train, deploy and employ the international military force that they have jointly crafted in the post-Cold War era has commenced. Trained abroad, it will now be used at home: Europe.
