Like I said .....take it for what it's worth.
The leaked German docs list eastern European countries, in 2025, as possible targetsfor Putin's ambitions.
Are all the armchair General's around here more privy to Putin's plans, then the worldwide intelligence agencies?
Don't underestimate evil men, and don't underestimate China's ambitions.
I am "around here" and I am not an "armchair general." I am a real one. It is a pretty small club, and we stay in contact.
Putin can not carry out another ground invasion for quite a while thanks to Ukraine and Western support. He obviously could strike with nuclear weapons, but that would be national and cultural suicide.
Political interests in Germany and Poland, as the leading military states confronting Russia on the Continent, and Sweden and Finland, as the Alliance's newest members, are all vested in more fully developing their deterrence capabilities. Leaking a threat assessment would underscore the need for such preparedness.
In this case, the leaked document is a scenario setter for a defense planning exercise.
The hand ringing class on both the right and left tends to read headlines - "THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!" - or memes - rather than take a few minutes to do just a bit of due diligence to understand the actual story. The attached is better than most.
Berlin’s secret wargame exercise ends with NATO mobilizing 300,000 troops to defend its eastern flank by next May.
europeanconservative.com
With Putin's established behavior, a national or alliance planning effort, would seem prudent. Any such exercise requires a set of conditions to be met for the planning scenario to make sense. If this were a US planning exercise, a couple of majors would have developed the exercise environment. I suspect something similar is going on in the Bundeswehr. The field exercises with Poland would add an actual deployment element.
This represents standard US/NATO exercise formula where multiple headquarters participate, but only a few elements are actually in the field. The likelihood of the exercise conditions setting framework actually happening is close to zero. But preparedness is never a bad thing, and the fact that Germany and Poland are making serious efforts is reassuring.
I have participated in exercises where we invaded Canada, defended the Flint Hills of Kansas, and fought off a Chinese amphibious assault on Big Sur. Other exercises were in defense of the Fulda Gap, the Tigris Euphrates river valleys, and a host of others. All had a condition setter that created the environment for the exercise to take place. None were important. It was the actual warfighting planning, coordination, and execution among various HQs that was the point of the drill.
www.forbes.com
