US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order increasing Operation Atlantic Resolve in Europe with 3,000 reserve personnel on July 13.
Since February 2022, the Pentagon has deployed over 20,000 additional forces to Europe, bringing its current total to over 100,000 across the Old Continent in the wake of the beginning of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine.
"The United States is giving every indication that it is prepared to have a confrontation with Russia," Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, told Sputnik "And Russia is taking that seriously. I mean, just given their history, they have no alternative but to take it seriously."
The US is amassing troops in Europe at the time Ukraine's military capability of taking on the Russian troops is waning.
Manpower Deficit and Insufficient Training
The Ukrainian military is suffering from a manpower deficit, according to the expert. He cited the fact that the Ukrainian Army trained by NATO over the past several years for a proxy war against Russia was destroyed during the first phases of the special military operation.
The "second version" of the Ukrainian Army was involved in taking Kherson and Kharkov in September 2022; but again, that army was obliterated. Now Ukraine is on the "third version," which has been part of the ongoing counteroffensive, as per Johnson.
The provision of sophisticated weaponry and training to the Ukrainian military cannot save the day for Kiev. The crux of the matter is that the training provided by NATO member states is insufficient, the CIA veteran explained.
"A lot of these soldiers that the Ukrainians throw into the front lines have had two to three months of training, period," Johnson said. "And they're not even following a standard training regimen: some are being trained in England; some are being trained in Germany, some in Poland, some in Italy, some in France. It's like a patchwork quilt then. There's a reason in the military they use that term - uniform - to describe something that everybody's doing the same way. When you have six, seven, 30 different countries doing training for, you know, thousands of different Ukrainians, you're not getting any kind of standard uniform training. So, all of that put together means that anybody with just a minimal education in the military sciences would know this was a failed effort to them from the start."
In addition, three-to-five months of training does not allow the Ukrainian military to master operating NATO-grade weapons efficiently enough.
"The requirement to train a soldier to be able to operate effectively in a combat theater is not to get basic training. Well, that's about 13 weeks (…) That just gives you the basics," Johnson said. "Then you go into what they call advanced individual training. And that again, could be another two-to-three month process just to get basic skills. And If you're going to be driving a tank, if you're going to be shooting an M777 artillery piece, but that's just you individually learning so that you are competent and that doesn't begin to address how you will interact in carrying out operations. So when we talk about a company level, we're talking about 150 people roughly, then that jumps up to a battalion level. And then when you get to a brigade, you could be dealing with 5,000 people. And so how are you people learning how to move with a large group of people to interact, to respond to commands, to know where you're located. You know, it becomes very complex. That takes time."
To complicate matters further, the NATO-grade weapons have become a primary target for the Russian Armed Forces.
Speaking to a Russian broadcaster on July 13, President Vladimir Putin noted that Ukrainian servicemen "often refuse to even get into [NATO] tanks, because they are a priority target for our guys."
In the beginning of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Kiev sustained heavy losses in the Western-made armored vehicles. "Western tanks burn even better than the famous Soviet-made T-72s," as Putin remarked in his Thursday interview.
As of July 13, the Russian Armed Forces had reportedly destroyed 10,668 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles belonging to Ukraine since the beginning of the special military operation.
Foreign Mercenaries Unprepared for High-Intensity Warfare
Even though more and more reports emerge online about an uptick of mercenary sightings on the Ukrainian battlefield, these forces are not a panacea, either, according to the CIA veteran. Foreign mercenaries simply cannot help Ukraine since they are not prepared for high-intensity warfare.
"The problem with the foreign mercenaries is that their experience comes from ground fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 20 years," Johnson said. "Some of these individuals have come back and said, 'Oh, my God, we've never experienced anything like what's going on in Ukraine.' Why is that? At no point in either Iraq or Afghanistan were they up against an enemy force that had long-range artillery that was firing cruise missiles and rockets that could deliver glide bombs from fixed-wing aircraft, that had helicopters that could launch missiles at eight-to-ten kilometer range and take out tanks. They never faced that."
Foreign mercenaries are neither equipped nor prepared to deal with Russia's 155mm mortars, let alone Russia's TOS-1 Buratino, a 220 mm 30-barrel or 24-barrel multiple rocket launchers that just decimate the area they are targeting, according to the expert.
NATO May Make Extreme Decisions Due to Lack of Options
The ability of NATO to influence the situation on the ground in Ukraine is becoming weaker with each passing day, as per the CIA veteran, as the much-advertised Kiev counteroffensive stalls.
The West is unable to supply Kiev with 155-millimeter artillery shells that the Ukrainian Army fires every day. Nor does the West have the industrial capability to provide those rounds in the amount needed to sustain operations on the Ukrainian side, Johnson continued, adding that Russia is doing well in this respect by out-producing the West "by a factor of at least ten."
Under these circumstances, NATO doesn’t have an easy option to bail out Ukraine other than to risk direct involvement in the conflict, which means a nuclear war, per the expert.
"What NATO now faces is having to take more extreme decisions that are going to run the risk of widening this war up to this point (…) As the situation in Ukraine grows more desperate from the standpoint of NATO being able to sustain its forces, the United States may try to insert its own conventional army units into the battle. If that happens, the one they're going to get wiped out again, it's going to raise the risk of this escalating into a nuclear conflict, not that Russia would initiate it, but that the United States, in desperation, is not going to have any other cards to play. That's the real concern here, that the United States has convinced itself that it has a lot more capability than it really does," Johnson concluded.