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The deployment in a NATO country to confront Ukraine is perceived as a style of deterrence for a U. S. military that recently withdrew from direct combat.
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By Lara Jakes
MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU AIR BASE, Romania (AP) — Soldiers from the U. S. Army’s 101st Airborne DivisionU. S. trains and eats and sleeps at a boring and sprawling outpost in southeastern Romania, a seven-minute flight from a rocket from where Russia has stored ammunition in Crimea.
Further north, army training with Romanian troops a few miles from the Ukrainian border, U. S. soldiers, also from the 101st Division, fire artillery, launch helicopter attacks and dig trenches similar to those on the front lines in the region near Kherson, the Ukrainian port city from which Russian troops withdrew in November.
This is the first time the 101st Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe since World War II, and with its presence in NATO member Romania, it is now closer to war in Ukraine than any other U. S. Army unit. U. S.
His project is perceived as a style for a U. S. military. The U. S. government has just stepped back after two decades of active warfare and an era in which it seeks to deter adversaries: a show of force, as well as training, delivery of weapons and other aid to return home. . Period.
“This is a regional conflict, but it has global implications,” said the U. S. Army chief of staff. U. S. Gen. James C. McConville in a mid-December interview at the air base, which features a runway with an advertisement near the airport named after former Romanian Prime Minister Mihail Kogalniceanu near the Black Sea.
The deployment of troops in Romania is a wake-up call to Moscow, as part of President Biden’s pledge to protect “every square inch” of NATO territory without inciting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, to climb. But conducting joint training is also a way to make sure allies in southeastern Europe are in a position to hold the line.
It’s unclear what kind of footprint the U. S. will retain at the base; the Pentagon will soon decide whether to maintain the number of U. S. troops and senior commanders.
Some members of Congress are wary of the assembly’s accusation of Ukraine’s continued demands: The House’s most sensible Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, suggested in October that his party might not need to write a “blank check” to Ukraine.
But advocates of maintaining a strong presence in Eastern Europe pointed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February as evidence that the United States and its NATO allies did enough to deter Moscow last winter.
“This is one of the most important classes that we want to be informed about from Ukraine,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. , told reporters after returning from a briefing to Ukraine in early December. just play like Ukraine, in the Pacific with China and Taiwan, we have to make sure deterrence succeeds. “
Military planners echoed this strategy, noting that the 101st Airborne Division was also the Black Sea for coastal defense education, a useful skill if China ever becomes more competitive and invaded Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing has long claimed as its own.
The department was ordered to deploy around 4,000 infantrymen and senior commanders within weeks of the invasion of Russia. They arrived at the air base, near the Romanian coastal town of Constanta, during the summer. The base in the past served as a sleepy outpost. for the education of NATO troops, adding several hundred American troops, and was best known in the military as a transit station with a little mess for American forces heading to and from Afghanistan.
The project here is another from other parts of Europe, where some U. S. troops exercise Ukrainian forces in complex weapons systems that are sent to Ukrainians. The division’s commander, Maj. Gen. J. P. McGee, said exercising with other Eastern European infantrymen has its own value.
“You have the ability to exercise and function on the same court that you have to defend,” General McGee said.
He added: “You have to work with a NATO ally, and it’s almost in the long run that we’re going to fight without allies. “
In addition to troops in Romania, General McGee also sent smaller groups of infantrymen to exercise with NATO allies in Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia. The unit prides itself on being the closest to combat, but by no means the largest: officials He said about 12,000 infantrymen attached to the army’s First Infantry Division, added after the invasion, are basically based in western Poland and the Baltic.
Together, they constitute a buildup of U. S. forces in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine, as Biden promised allies at a NATO summit in Madrid in June.
In Army training with U. S. forces. In the U. S. and the U. K. , Romanian troops tested HIMARS rocket launch systems, the same weapons that helped Ukraine push Russian forces into retreat, as opposed to simulated targets in the Black Sea in recent months. Romania bought 3 of the rocket systems years ago and said they were still being delivered.
Lt. Gen. Iulian Berdila, head of Romania’s floor forces, who welcomed the deployment, said regional officials had warned the West about Russia’s “gradual and toxic” advances since it seized Crimea from Ukraine in a local referendum in 2014. The Global considers illegal.
“We have been very attentive to what Russia is doing and what the consequences are,” Berdila said. On education with U. S. troops, he said: “We have played war in combination in the other scenarios and we are in a position to synchronize plans. “as we talk. “
The number and command of U. S. forces lately in Romania are sufficient, he said, for “predictable deterrence and defense together. “
General McConville didn’t expect what the Biden administration could do in Romania, but speaking, he said the troops at the air base “had really made a difference, and I think we’re going to continue to provide the functions as needed. “. “
Having a department commander and staff so close to the Ukrainian border is more than symbolic, said Becca Wasser, a war analyst at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. It makes it imaginable to make quick decisions about where to place thousands of troops and weapons if Russia pushes war on NATO territory.
“What you’re seeing is indicative of a shift in the way the U. S. military is doing so. “The U. S. is addressing posture and deployments around the world as the era of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed,” Wasser said. What you have is a display of deterrence. “
It’s the same kind of mission, Wasser said, that was carried out through tens of thousands of U. S. troops sent to U. S. Central Command bases. The US was in 2020 when tensions with Iran erupted in the Middle East.
For Commando Sergeant Major Vitalia Sanders, who leads a battalion at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, the project is so professional.
He was born in the open-air city of Uzhhorod in western Ukraine and moved to northwest Indiana at the age of 12 to live with his grandmother. He was last in Ukraine in 2005 and his brother is still there, though his communications via WhatsApp and Facebook have been limited as Russian movements have destroyed networks of force.
Sergeant Major Sanders has been in the U. S. Army. He was a U. S. citizen for 21 years and has served in Afghanistan and Kuwait. But he never forgot the risk Russia posed to Ukraine.
“Just being here, so close to home,” he said, “makes me hungry and makes me fight, and hopefully that conveys that power to the foot soldiers so they know what this is like for everybody. “
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