The last REFORGER was conducted in 1993. In March of this year, it will have been a quarter century.
Why REFORGER now? If we are serious about the below, it is the natural next step.
…American armour is again fanning out across the continent’s east with a mission not just to show strength to an emboldened Russia, but to test whether the mundane matter of logistics might hobble Nato’s response to any provocative action.
… a senior Nato official says the alliance is “looking at all those things we forgot how to do”. He admits the pact — or at least some of its members — could have been quicker to heed warnings from events such as a wide-ranging cyber attack in Estonia in 2007 and the brief Russia-Georgia war in 2008. “All of the indicators were there,” he says. “We took our eye off the ball.”
…The logistical problems run deeper than distance. In central and eastern Europe, where many countries were either in the Soviet Union or part of its Warsaw Pact, infrastructure is sometimes sparse or dilapidated. Bridges, tunnels, roads, railways and ports in western Europe have not been built in the past 25 years to carry large numbers of heavy US military vehicles. “They are no longer building bridges in Europe with a 70-tonne capacity capable of supporting the weight of an Abrams tank,” says Douglas Lute, former US permanent representative to Nato.The quantity and variety of glitches is intimidating: a six-hour delay to shipments crossing between Poland and Lithuania due to a change in rail gauge; the obstacles military vehicles face clearing the many Polish railway stations that have only one siding (Warsaw says most stations have more than one); the limitations of Bremerhaven, a German North Sea port, where access is via a single road gate that allows only a total of 1,500 vehicles per day in and out.
Yes, we are overdue for a REFORGER. New ports, new challenges.
Of note, the linked FT article is ground centric. As good USNIBlog readers know, a lot of REFORGER’s value was what we learned at sea.
You want to put Russia on notice? Encourage our friends and frustrate our challengers? Restart REFORGER.
As the cliche goes; a professional studies logistics.
