Thursday, November 27, 2014

More Activity Sets

We said we might put more "activity sets" of heavy armor to allow battalion-sized exercises in Europe, and now it looks like we'll have two more to add to the one we kept in Europe. Hopefully this is a step to having "unit sets" there.

Our heavy armor will creep east in NATO:

Nearly 50 armored vehicles are already in place and another 100 M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles will be "pre-positioned" in Germany and possibly elsewhere for the US troops conducting drills with NATO partners, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges told AFP in a phone interview from Estonia.

"The troops will come over and train, and they'll go back. The equipment will stay behind," Hodges said. ...

"I'm going to look at options that would include distributing this equipment in smaller sets, company-size or battalion-size, perhaps in the Baltics, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, places like that," he said.

The 50 pieces of armor are in an "activity set" already in Europe that supports units who are going to exercise there rather than bringing in their own equipment.

We'll have two more activity sets, it seems. That will give us three battalion-sized equipment sets.

Add in brigade support units, keep all of it together, and we'll have the first prepositioned unit set, starting us on the process of finally building REFORPOL in eastern NATO.

Or do you think Putin has no more territorial ambitions?