Defense expert Ko Colijn has been providing Dutch people with information on armed conflicts for over forty years. For NU.nl he follows the battle in Ukraine and answers our (and your) questions. This time: How does NATO strengthen itself as a counterweight to Russia?
There were cheers for the outcome of the NATO summit in Madrid and songs of joy for the unity displayed there. Ukraine was of course an important theme, but NATO itself was also on the menu. Even as a main course.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan bowed to the not so firm commitments from Sweden and Finland, so those two countries may join the alliance. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg had stooped to some “understanding” of Turkey’s concerns over the Kurds.
He had borrowed that concept from the Netherlands, which also somewhat agreed with Operation Olive Branch, the offensive that Turkey unleashed in 2019 against Kurdish groups in Northern Syria. The same Kurds who actually helped NATO defeat Islamic State (IS), something the alliance itself had failed to do.
The shirt is therefore closer than the skirt. That shirt is your own safety, not that of the Kurds. The Russian aggression in Ukraine weighed more heavily in Madrid.
US pays by far the most
However, not everyone is satisfied. Because for all the tough talk about unity and higher defense spending, the US is still paying the lion’s share of the bill. The divided EU is dangling a bit. The Americans now account for 80 percent of arms aid to Ukraine and the Europeans 20 percent. That would actually reversed should.
It’s the same thing in NATO. The US will soon supply almost half of the reinforced force in Eastern Europe (which will increase from 40,000 to 300,000). The rest will fall on the shoulders of the (soon) 31 other Member States.
Operation of weapons donated to Ukraine is a bottleneck
Back to the war in Ukraine. There is a lot of talk about Western arms supplies, which the Russians have to stop. Russian bombing of weapons depots has occasionally caused delays, but arms deliveries generally arrive after a week.
The bottleneck is not in the weapon flow or Russian obstacle bombing, but in the manuals for the increasingly sophisticated weaponry. A HIMARS rocket launcher can reach the front from a great distance, but operating the most modern ones requires at least three weeks of training (and actually more).
It is underexposed that the US has actually been busy with this since 2014. Contacts with Ukraine have existed for some time, but were strongly intensified after the annexation of Crimea by Russia.
Training Ukrainian army by US continues in Poland
Hundreds of members of special forces and regular soldiers of the US National Guard have been in Ukraine to train their Eastern European counterparts. By not changing the trainers so often, it has been ensured that the ties between teachers and students are quite close. Shortly after the invasion on February 24, the telephone rang at the home of David Baldwin, the general in charge of training, requesting that training for new tactics and weapons be continued immediately, in a screwed-up form, in Poland.
Baldwin said yes without hesitation. He had already foreseen the invasion and removed the American military from Ukraine a few weeks earlier, to avoid confrontation with Russian troops.
Ukraine takes precedence, but is not alone: the so-called State Partnership Program includes 85 programs 93 countries† The country is linked to the National Guard of the state of California, but those of Connecticut, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia have also joined.
Just two days after US President Joe Biden announced on April 13 that Ukraine would be supported, the first items from the arsenals of National Guard units were shipped. This initially concerned helmets and medical equipment (which were also sent by the Netherlands, but that took weeks), but also ‘retired’ M113 armored vehicles. They have not been in service with the US since 2006, but apparently still useful on the Ukrainian battlefields.
–
