Quotulatiousness

June 9, 2016

NATO’s peacetime border problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Foreign Affairs, Elisabeth Braw discusses a problem NATO faces every time there’s a need to move troops across national borders within the alliance:

“NATO’s member states are willing to defend one another, and they have the troops and the equipment to do so. But quickly getting those troops and equipment to their destination is a different matter altogether. In some new NATO member states, bridges and railroads are simply not suitable for large troop movements. But one thing frustrates commanders even more: the arduous process of getting permission to move troops across borders.

“I was probably naïve,” admits Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “I assumed that because these were NATO and EU countries we’d just be able to move troops. But ministries of defense are not responsible for borders.”

[…]

And there’s the complication. Moving troops across Europe requires permission at each border. “During the Cold War, we had pretty good plans to rapidly move across borders, but until [the 2014 NATO summit in] Wales we didn’t have similar plans for new NATO member states,” says a NATO official knowledgeable with the issue. “Right after Crimea we sent out a questionnaire about [border regulations] to each member states, and the results were pretty scary. Some countries needed to recall parliament in order to let NATO units cross their borders. And one country said, ‘we can only have 1,600 soldiers on our soil.’” In reality, that meant that NATO would be unable to use that member state, which the NATO official declined to identify, for passage.

Since then, NATO has made impressive progress. It has tripled the size of its 13-year-old NATO Response Force (NRF), which can muster up to 40,000 troops and is, at least in theory, able to deploy quickly to new NATO member states as well as old ones. And all of its member states have agreed to pre-clearance—the military version of a green card for troops and equipment—although it is not clear how the system will work in practice. As the NATO official reports, “some countries say ‘we don’t need any advance notice for pre-clearance,’ while others say they need four to five days’ notice.” According to the official, in most of NATO’s eastern-facing countries, getting the clearance would be a matter of five days or fewer, although one country—he declined to specify which one—still requires more time.

And so, although Hodges and his fellow commanders know how fast their troops can physically move, they have little idea whether crossing borders will take five days, two days, or perhaps just hours. “An official [in an eastern European NATO member state] told me, ‘I hope we can get this [clearance] done quickly,’” Hodges reports. “But you can’t plan based on hopes and wishes.”

H/T to Colonel Ted Campbell for the link.

“Let people do what they want with their own bodies and property”: Q&A with Todd Seavey

Filed under: Books, Education, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 7 Jun 2016

“The experience of having everybody around me on campus say the left is the way to go and then…seeing communism collapse made me think maybe the libertarians have a better handle on how these things work,” says Todd Seavey, author of the new book Libertarianism for Beginners. “While the Soviet Union existed, the Marxists on campus were rooting for the Soviet Union.”

A New York-baseed comic-book writer, one-time producer for TV’s own John Stossel, and a contributor to Splice Today, Seavey found his way toward libertarianism while attending Brown University in the late 1980s.

His new graphic book, Libertarianism for Beginners, argues that the core message of libertarians is to “keep the government small and let people do what they want with their own bodies and property.”

QotD: Teaching Canada a lesson

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Speaking of Canada and plans, and looking north at the egregious hereditary idiot running the place, the one with the penchant for physical assault of legislators, and his over-privileged and -entitled wife, plus the lunatics who put him in office, it is not impossible that Canada would someday permit easy access to Latins and then ease their way to crossing our northern border. We need to make it absolutely clear that if they ever start doing this their existence as a sovereign nation will end and they will become just another province of a not especially friendly empire, us. We’ve long been Canada’s last line of defense, but they’re our first. They’d better goddamned realize what that means before letting Prince Justin engage his more humanitarian delusions.

Tom Kratman, El Imperio Contraataque Part 5: Or Maybe More Than A Single Ounce of Prevention…”, EveryJoe, 2016-05-30.

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