Could European armies respond quickly to a Russian attack on the bloc's eastern flank? Beyond the political decision that should put into practice the theory that an attack against one is an attack against all the countries of the European Union, as promised by the treaties of the community bloc and the Atlantic Alliance (NATO)many in the Old Continent wonder if the infrastructure and roads are prepared to efficiently and safely move hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tons of military material.
Some doubt it. That is why a little over a year ago, on November 10, 2022, the European Commission announced a program that sought to identify bottlenecks, where the problems could be in ensuring that soldiers and military equipment moved as quickly as possible to the east, because the only military threat that Europe identifies right now is the Russian one. The same threat that justified the creation of NATO at the beginning of the Cold War.
This first project, signed at the end of January of this year between Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, is the largest of the first 38 projects launched and will receive a total of 807 million euros. The majority of this budget is destined to renew railway facilities, as well as other small works, such as reinforcing bridges and roads.
There is money, for example, to isolate the French train stations of Grenoble, Bordeaux and Metz from power outages, to speed up the unloading of heavy military equipment in Belgian and Swedish ports or to expand fuel storage capacity at airports. from Latvia and Lithuania.
The day that program was presented, the vice president of the European Commission, the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager, said that the military should use civilian infrastructure such as bridges, railways or roads that in reality may not be prepared to “support the vehicles heavyweights of the Armies.”
The reason is that they do not receive adequate maintenance for that and because they were not designed directly with in mind that one day they could be used for military mobility. Vestager also said that fuel depots needed to be reinforced and in some cases expanded so that large-scale troop movements were not affected by lack of fuel. Wars cannot be won without effective logistics work.
The plan, which runs until the end of 2026, is in principle financed with a maximum of 1.7 billion euros of funds from the European Union budget, which will be completed with national funds. The point, the European Commission said then, is that the armies can respond “better, faster and on a sufficient scale to crises that arise on the external borders of the European Union and beyond them.”
Above all, Brussels identified a corridor of strategic importance that would run from the ports of the North Atlantic coast (from the French port of Calais to the German port of Hamburg, passing through Dunkirk, Zeebrugge, Antwerp, Rotterdam or Amsterdam), all among the largest in Europeand then by land through the north of France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia.
British, Canadian and, above all, American military aid should arrive through these ports if the eastern borders of the European Union, as more and more leaders of the bloc are warning, face a Russian attack in the coming years.
Some senior leaders, such as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, speak of the possibility of a Russian attack on a NATO and EU country in the next two or three years. Everyone looks with fear at the three small Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), difficult to defend, which were part of the Soviet Union, with important Russian national minorities and with armies so emaciated that they control their airspace by fighter planes from other European countries.
In 2018 there was a first plan that the European Commission evaluated favorably and from which the bases of the new one emerged, endowed with more funds after the Russian attack against Ukraine. ANDThe first agreement of the new plan was signed on January 30 by Germany, the Netherlands and Poland with the objective of moving military material and men “as quickly and efficiently as possible” from the deep-water ports of the North Sea (capable of unloading the largest Anglo-Saxon military vessels) to the eastern borders of Europe.
Vladislav Kosiniak-Kamysz, Polish Defense Minister of the new liberal-conservative coalition government, said that “the large-scale war taking place in Ukraine shows the importance of the rapid movement of allied troops.”
During the Cold War, NATO ensured that European governments had their military mobility plans regularly updated, at a time when the European Union was still an incipient organization focused on trade relations and common agricultural policy. Those military mobility plans stopped being updated in 1997 despite the fact that when the Berlin Wall fell the border to be defended went more than 1,000 kilometers to the east.
The great enlargement of the European Union in 2004 towards the east ended up consolidating Eastern Europe as a territory to defend from Russia in case of attack. That Iron Curtain that descended from the northern German coast to the Adriatic was moved to a line that runs from Tallinn (Estonia) to Chisinau (Moldova).
Everything so that it does not happen like when in 2022 France began sending Leclerc tanks to Romania to protect the border with Ukraine against the Russian advance and the tanks could not circulate through Germany in trucks for fear that their weight would sink bridges.
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