The symbolic threshold of 100,000 prepositioned soldiers has been crossed in recent weeks.
by and
This is one of the major consequences of the war in Ukraine, spent relatively in the background so far, the sign of a strategic footing as sudden as unexpected on the part of the first military power worldwide. The reinforcement, in recent weeks, of the United States military presence in Europe, with the symbolic threshold of 100,000 prepositioned men Franched, was to be particularly highlighted at the NATO summit, Thursday, March 24, in Brussels, In the presence of Joe Biden. A summit that fits into a diplomatic marathon, the US president is expected on the same day at a meeting of the G7 and the European Union, then in Poland, Friday.
While for many years the United States was engaged in a discreet withdrawal of their forces on the Old Continent in order to redeploy them in Indo-Pacific, in the face of the rise of Chinese economic and military expansionism, with the Climbing tensions between kyiv and Moscow, between January and March, about 20,000 US soldiers were returned to European soil. An increase of 25% in a few weeks, which brings the United States military presence in Europe at a level that the latter had not known for more than fifteen years, and which represents about one-third of its presence at the exit From the cold war.
On the strict accounting plan, the Pentagon has always had a high number of soldiers in Europe, particularly in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Poland. The state bases extend from Bulgaria to Greenland, Greece to Finland. Before the war in Ukraine, the US military, which is a mass army (1.4 million active soldiers), thus had some 67,000 soldiers permanently positioned in these various locations – which was added 13 000 men of complementary rotation units.
“Tide Rate”
But in just three months, these workforce found their 2005 level, when the United States was engaged in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Their exact distribution is voluntarily left relatively blurred by the Pentagon. It nevertheless appears that most of the reinforcements arrived since January went to Poland, where more than 10,000 US soldiers are now officially deployed (an increase of more than 7,000). About 2,500 soldiers are also distributed between Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, while some 1,500 men are now positioned in Slovakia, 350 in Bulgaria and 200 in Hungary.
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