#Lithuania Exercise

[nullnvoid911]

Members of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service (+dog) during exercise PRIEDANGA 2023 on the Belarus border.

Arno Čemerkos / KAM, August 22, 2023

[captain-price-unofficially]

M1A2 Abrams on exercise, probably in Lithuania with NATO.

[adnauseum11]

Defence Logistics (John Price x Reader)

2.6 k words

CW: swearing, canon-typical violence, minor character death

This work is part of the S.N.A.F.U. series, the Masterlist is pinned to my blog

I don't know why, but I've struggled with this chapter more than any others lately. The format I chose, the tenses, all of it was a puzzle I've been wrestling with. I don't know if it's my insomnia making a come back or what, but I have been agonizing on this one. Almost scrapped it altogether but have decided to be brave and let 'er rip. I found writing John without the warmth he has for his love a bit jarring, having the ability to turn off that part of yourself and focus on wrecking damage on others was hard to capture. If it's subpar I can only apologize lol - the next chapter is already coming easier.

Feedback welcome, if folks have any tips or suggestions - this is all for fun and improvement! (that's what I keep telling myself anyways lol)

Masterlist

John’s transfixed, watching rusty blood swirl around the shower drain, his mind still back in the field. He’s showering off before he drives home from the black site, situated deep in the English country side. He’s bruised in several places, with a fresh cut across his lower forearm where the Commander’s knife had connected during a wild swing. The dull throb pulls his brain back to the present moment, making him realize he’s slowly dripping blood all over his own feet. He lifts the cut above his heart and tries to refocus his thoughts. Kate’s dealing with the paperwork, folding their use of equipment into existing work orders. Gaz and Simon are also showering, medical and debrief waiting for them all on the other side of the steam. John’s mind keeps running over the events of the last few days, looking for anything he’s missed.

Thankfully, he and Ghost had arrived in Lithuania a whole day ahead of Gaz’s taskforce. They had driven across Vilnius in an SUV that had been held together with good intentions and baler twine, as far as John could make out. It had rattled something awful, to the point they had ditched it on a side road and hiked the last few rough miles, working their way across farmer’s fields dodging cattle and sheep in the early morning light. The Industrial section was set outside of city limits, in between old farms, where the smells and sounds would be less likely to disrupt the rhythms of life. The physical exercise helped re-center John’s mind on the task at hand. The way things had been left between himself and his love had unsettled him, giving his mind a stone to turn over instead of focusing on his immediate surroundings. He’d said more than he’d wanted to in explaining his departure, opening a can of worms he hadn’t intended and couldn’t put right before he left. If Ghost noticed John’s initial lack of focus, he said nothing.

The intercept point was more or less on top of the taskforce’s rendezvous point, in the back end of a massive sheep field with a small hut built out of field stones. By the time they arrived to do their recon, he had pulled himself together mentally and was feeling more present. John’s body remembered the training that had been drilled in to it, the rust of retirement flaking away as time stretched on. Soon it was nearly like he had never left.  He and Ghost discussed how to proceed in various probable scenarios as they checked the surrounding area.

How many people were involved in the revenge plot would depend on how the commander split his forces, to John’s mind. If he kept Gaz under his direct command there was likely no one else involved and Gaz was unlikely to survive the mission. If he sent Gaz with one of the other men, it was more likely they all were involved and it was more probable they would detain Gaz for information. Ghost agreed with John’s assessment, and they scouted the area before making a small camp a quarter of a mile from the rendezvous point to wait.

The downbeat of helicopter blades alerted them to the taskforce arriving a few hours after dark. John had signaled to Ghost, stubbing his cigar out and flipping the night vision goggles on. Then he and Ghost set out, snaking through the underbrush, using trees as cover as they moved in on the clearing and the stone hut. Once they got within a few hundred yards of the edge of the clearing they fanned out, Ghost swinging wide behind the unloading area.

They watched silently as five men disembarked using ropes, the wash of the helicopter blades obscuring any noise for several long minutes. Finally, it lifted, slowly claiming altitude again in the darkness, a handful of blinking lights the only outward signal of its location. The men had immediately moved on the stone hut as they landed one by one, quickly sweeping and entering it. John and Ghost had stayed in position, watching the hut for signs of life. Eventually the men exited, filtering into two separate groups. One group of two and another group with the remaining three. John located the Commander, pointing out the line of travel and giving a shove to one of his men. He squinted through his goggles, quickly identifying Gaz as the other man in the Commander’s trio.

As the groups split off into the darkness, the former Captain let the warmth of his anger wash over him again, keeping his movements purposeful and his mind on task. Staying a healthy distance behind, he stalked the trio as they hiked along the edge of the pasture, using trees and the waist high rock fence as cover. John tracked them easily with his night vision, quietly moving deeper in the woods. Ghost had shadowed the other group who were working their way further into the woods, opposite to where John and Ghost had camped and back towards the plant. When the Commander paused a few miles later near the badly rutted dirt road, their intent became clear to John.

The Commander’s group was set to create a diversion at the front gate of the chemical plant while the secondary team got in and collected the intel they were after. John waited until they were moving again to softly relay his plan to Ghost who responded with a subdued “rog that” in his ear. John moved incrementally closer on silent feet, waiting to see how they would go about creating their diversion. He watched as the Commander motioned Gaz to push forward, yanking a grenade from Gaz’s tac vest and pressing it into his hand. John had to force himself to wait, the instinct to get to Gaz pressing in on him tightly.

 The front gate was framed with two concrete pillars, into which were sunk the posts for retractable chain link fencing. Beyond that, a bar gate, manned by middling security guards wearing flak vests and holstered pistols. John had guessed they were there to keep the local gangs out more than they were prepared to deal with para-military operations. He was proven correct shortly after when Gaz lobbed the grenade in his hand at the chain link fence. It landed close enough to blow the gate off its track, making what was left of the twisted metal hang at an awkward angle. The explosion rocked the gate house, making the men inside shout and duck for cover. Gaz lobbed another grenade, this one blasting the gate off completely, the smoking metal smashing into the ground with a loud screech.

The men inside the gate house finally got themselves organized and started cautiously coming out, using the door as cover as they opened return fire into the darkness. John watched as the Commander gave Gaz’s shoulder a shove, jerking his head towards the gate house. John understood in a flash the Commander was trying to position Gaz where a stray bullet wouldn’t be blinked at if it connected. John was instantly moving, his feet creeping him closer to their position when Gaz did the unexpected. Instead of scurrying forward as they all assumed, he threw himself backwards, kicking his legs up to get leverage as he swung his body around to lock legs with the other soldier, standing beside the Commander. He went down in a heap, Gaz wrestling for top position for all he was worth.

John sprinted the last few yards, yanking the unsuspecting and now screaming Commander by the back of the tac vest before he could interfere. Chaos reigned as shots continued to pepper out from the gate house and the men shouted each other down. John hadn’t been fast enough getting his hands clear, the Commander yanking a Bowie knife free from his vest and swinging wildly over his head, trying to fend off the attack from behind. John grunted when the tip of the knife skittered across his arm but he didn’t stop in his action, drawing his rifle butt up and bringing it down on the Commander’s cheek as he stumbled backwards. The blow knocked him unconscious, his body falling the rest of the way into a heap.

Gaz was still scrambling on the ground with the bigger soldier, trading blows before John stepped in, levelling his pistol at the man’s head and pulling the trigger without hesitation. Gaz was instantly covered in a spray of brain matter and blood, and his hands came up instinctively, warding off another shot from the same direction. John had spoken up then.

“On your feet soldier.”

John had offered him a hand and it took Gaz’s brain a split second to recognize the ex-Captain.

“Cap - Laswell said you uncovered this shitshow. Wasn’t sure you were going to leave your new girl for this though.”

Gaz had extended his hand, letting John haul him upright. John had hummed non-committedly, not wanting to get into the specifics of his presence in the field. He reached into his vest and pulled out zip-ties, handing them to Gaz.

“Smart man to not let him get you in a bad position. Get him restrained for now.”

He muttered before tapping his coms.

“Ghost, how copy?”

There was a brief pause and then Ghost’s deep voice was in John’s ear.

“They’re almost at the target. The explosions and gunfire pulled all attention from the rest of the building. Moving fast.”

“Regroup with us at the vehicle once they’re successful. Anything goes off the rails, I want to know ASAP. Out here.”

“Rog that, Captain.”

John let go of the comm and lifted his rifle again, firing a few bullets into the air. This riled up the security guards again, setting off another round of wild shots into the now eerily quiet night.

“Strip him. No insignia.”

John gestured to the remains of the solider, blood and thick brain matter pooling on the ground. Gaz started ripping the patches off the dead man’s vest, stuffing them into a spare pocket of his own. John reached over, using the muzzle of his rifle to push what was left of the man’s head to the side, reaching in to the neck and yanking the dog tags off, handing them to Gaz as well.

“Help me get this one further into the woods.”

John kicked the foot of the Commander, and Gaz stood, taking an elbow on one side. They carried him backwards, his dragging feet going silent as they entered deeper into the woods. Gaz counted out a hundred steps and then they propped him up against a tree. John rummaged around, pulling his field first aid kit out and locating the smelling salts.

“We’re going to wake him up. I want to know how many people he’s involved in this revenge scheme.”

“Think he’ll tell us the truth?”

“Won’t know unless we ask, soldier.”

John broke the salts and waved them under the unconscious man’s nose. Gaz refastened his gloves, crossing his arms over his chest as he watched the man wake.

“Oi, OI.”

John’s tone was abrupt, not giving the waking man time to adjust to his surroundings.

“Wha- “

“You wanted the 141, Commander, you’ve got ‘em.”

When it took the man a beat too long to respond, John reached out and slapped his cheek with his open palm, jerking his head back against the trunk of the tree.

“Wake up Sunshine. What do you want with the 141?”

The Commander’s words are slurred, likely concussed from the blow to his head.

“Killed my brother – “

“You want revenge.”

John’s tone was flat, emotionless. The words unamused and to the point.

“Justice.” The Commander coughed, his head lolling to the side as he squinted up at them. “But we make our own, don’t we Captain?”

“If we’re lucky. Any more of your men involved? You already got one man killed.”

“No.”

The word was spat out, the hatred tangible in his tone.

“Norris feeding you information?”

“Get fucked.”

John looked over at Gaz who nodded silently to John’s unasked question. John had raised his pistol and pointed it at the man’s foot.

“Norris feeding you information?”

“I said get fu – “

John unloaded the bullet into the man’s foot, the bones and flesh splintering inside his boot. A bloodcurdling scream rang out, bouncing off the trees, making it seem like it was all around them. John lifted the pistol to aim at the man’s knee, his face impassive as the scream died down, replaced with frantic wounded whimpering.

“Norris feeding you information?”

“Holy fuck, oh shit, wait, wait, wait please – “

John leaned in, speaking lowly for the man’s ears only, not sure how much Gaz had been told.

“You send a sexual predator to my woman’s place and expect this to go well for you?”

John didn’t wait for an answer and shot the man’s knee out, the spray of blood missing Gaz this time but catching the side of John’s chest. The howl the Commander let out was unearthly, birds startling from their nighttime roosts. Some deeply tucked away part of John that demanded the collection of a pound of flesh was perversely satisfied with the sound. John stepped away again, training his pistol on the heavily bleeding man’s uninjured foot. Gaz stood, emotionless as the ex-Captain moved around the prone man, the dark forest obscuring their movements from the road.

“Last chance before I even you up. Norris feeding you information?”

“He’s the one who told me about my brother being at Las Almas!! He’s the one.”

John had shot a look at Gaz before turning back to the now heavily wounded man propped up against the tree. He gestured to the zip ties behind the man’s back with the muzzle of his pistol.

“Cut him loose.”

“You’re going to pay for this – I’ll make sure everyone knows-”

John took aim and unloaded a final bullet into the man’s skull, shards of bone and brain mixing with the wood splinters and smoke in the air. Gaz startled but collected himself, stepping over to cut the ties off the body, pocketing them. The dead man’s arms fell forward once the tension of the plastic tie was released. John helped him strip any identifying insignia silently.

“You need to radio that you were ambushed, both men down. Do you have a secondary exfil?”

“Yeah, if we can get to Belarus, the location is a few clicks over the border.”

“We’ll take the vehicle as far as we can. Ghost is going to rendezvous with us, let’s move out.”

John had waited to loop Ghost in before reaching out to Kate with their new exfil plans - taking turns sleeping in the vehicle for the rest of night while pushing on to the border. This gave Kate time to organize their ride and run interference with the story of the ambush. Which is how John spent Christmas Eve, crammed into a dilapidated SUV in the rural area of Lithuania’s border with Belarus, amongst his mates eating cold MRE’s again, all of them tired but alive.

Simon’s deep rumble knocks him out of his mental reverie, calling him back to his current position under the steaming water of his shower.  So far, outside of the problem of Norris, the only thing John has been able to surmise he’s missed in the last few days is Christmas dinner with his love.

“Laswell said she’s sending the medic in after ye’ if ye’ don’t git yer ass in gear, Cap.”

John shuts the water off with a sigh and presses his lips together.

“That’ll do, Ghost. I'll be there shortly.”

Next Chapter

Ao3

Tag list:

@deadbranch @beebeechaos @cadotoast @syoddeye @writeforfandoms @itr-00 @chloepluto1306 @batw3nch @magsmagic @h0n3y-l3m0n05 @chickennn-soupp

[amateurvoltaire]

For those of us living in the EU, it's a good time to remember that 235 years ago, an insignificant lawyer from Arras was passionately arguing for everyone's right to vote (1).

So, for those of us in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden, let's make the Candle of Arras proud tomorrow and exercise our right to contribute to the laws by which we are bound.

You can find more information on how to vote in the European elections here:

https://elections.europa.eu/

Notes

(1) He was arguing for universal male suffrage... but let's ignore that for today...

[council-of-beetroot]

You said you wanted some asks, so here goes: how do you think Lithuania copes with stress? What do you think stresses him out the most in the modern day? And would he ever consider going to therapy, or would he need to be shot with a tranquilizer dart to get him in the office?

Coping Mechanisms

~The unhealthy ~

Attempts to control as much as possible I his life and the lives of others

Gives himself more work than what is possible to accomplish.

Smokes

Lashes out at others after bottling things up like a fine wine for so long. Made worse that he isn't really communicative prior to lashing out about what he's upset about so he'll be fine for a bit and suddenly he is pissed and your left trying to figure out what you did to piss him off when it was probably 40 minor things and a few unrelated major things.

~ The Healthy ~

Spends time in nature

Exercises

Gardens

Would Liet go to therapy

I don't think he thinks he's deserving of therapy. Like I think he fully believes that any of the weight on his shoulders or anxiety is his fault for not doing enough, and other people are more deserving to be listened to about their struggles than he is.

I think one of his main struggles is that he thinks he is responsible for the well being of everyone. During the early days of his life he was in the task of defending his kingdom, in the period of Russian control, he basically made it his job to protect the others such as Raivis and Eduard and others at any cost.

I definitely think Ivan knew this was how Tolys works and so he definitely used it to control and manipulate Tolys in some ways. He definitely played into Tolys' view that his self worth is dependent on being able to protect others. He also used Tolys' view that he is somehow responsible to fix everything and used that even for small things like "oh Tolys, well, you knew that this chore I assigned didn't get done by the person I assigned it to, Tolys it's your duty to ensure things get done around here."

I just read a fic that goes into this really well link here Pirmas-Åalesundbren-AO3

Modern Day

I think he is also in denial that Ivan still has a lasting impact on him psychologically. Like the physical scars are there but he can ignore them and someday they should fade so the psychological ones should work the same way, not that he is self aware enough to consider himself still having psychological scars.

I think what stresses him out is the realization that the last time he was independent it lasted only 20 years, what makes this round any different. He also feels the weight of a lot of the current struggles in Eastern Europe politically and just ones that his fellow personifications deal with on a personal level are his responsibility. Needless to say, he's still stressed out.

I think he has a hard time setting boundaries with his current bosses after so long of being under Ivan that his bosses unintentionally suffocate him with so much work because Tolys won't refuse when asked if he can do a task.

This ask was really fun!

[aphfanficwriters]

Every month we will pose a question and collate responses as a fun and informal little exercise in getting to know each other and spark discussion.

For Hetalia's 18th anniversary, we asked our writers:

“How did you first get into Hetalia?”

Beetroot / @council-of-beetroot: People had recommended it to me prior since I'm a geography nerd but I heard it was offensive. At one point I read a fanfic about Hetalia Lithuania and that piqued my interest. But then like six months, around March of 2022, later I recalled my sister talking about a funny scene from Hetalia. So I decided to look up Hetalia out of context on YouTube. I decided nothing could be more offensive than I was at 13 so I watched that and then knew I had to watch the show. I watched the show in a weekend. It was particularly funny to watch at the time because my best friends that year in highs were foreign exchange students from Germany and Japan. Anyway here I am now.

Angel / @billowingangel: I got into Hetalia around 2015 by reading x Reader fanfiction and I stumbled upon a Germany x Reader on DeviantArt and then I went down a rabbit hole of the Hetalia countries x readers. The x reader fanfiction comforted me immensely as I was struggling greatly at the time and that was probably the worst time of my life. Then I found other Hetalia fanfiction and fanart, and I then watched some of the episodes on YouTube. Since then Hetalia has been something of great comfort and nostalgia to me. Hetalia honestly means so much to me and there's been so many lovely people in this fandom that I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with 💗

Didi / @teaedon: Searched my country on deviantart, found Hetalia OCs comics. Watched the anime when it had just 1 or 2 seasons out (both 2009), and began to keep up with blog and page translations on Livejournal (did I understand English at the time? Barely lmao). Then jumped from Livejournal to Tumblr but because a funny-unrelated-to-Heta blog, but soon more than later I started following Hetalia blogs... Made my sideblog in 2015; I should have done that sooner, it's around that time that my actual main fandom was another for a while. Even with the manga hiatus ending in 2021 (also new anime season), I only fully returned in 2022. No fics until... 2023, omg (the deleted ff.net one from when I was in school doesn't count).

Tama / @delgumofics: Back in 2012 my sister suggested I check it out, said it was funny. I watched ep1 subbed and by the end I had a glassy look in my eyes, shut it off, and promptly forgot about it. Later on it was on Netflix so I gave the dub a shot and died laughing. I binged the whole original run in a couple days then started looking at fics.

Eru / @eruverse: I first learned of Hetalia around well 10 years ago, but couldn’t get properly into it. I alrd liked Vanya but that was that [...] I properly got into Hetalia after they released Indonesia, so it was just around 2021. Was immediately thrown into Netherlands/Indonesia, the beloved ship of Indonesian fandom, creating fanarts for them and brainrotting with other Indonesian fans. Good times! Ah, NLID… other Indonesia ships would simply not compare to the weight of history, emotional baggage, and all kinds of other baggage of this one ship. You should check it out, and being Indonesian I have the front seat for accessing juicy historical materials. Nobody in the fandom knows the special side of Netherlands that Indonesians do.

@folightening: Bought and watched the first season a long time ago, I think it was out of curiosity. I remember people talking about it at school and I recognized the name at the store so I got the first season to check out. Didn't do anything more with it until ~2 years ago I think? Watched it again on a whim, bought the series in a collection set, found where I could read it, got my writer's block shattered, and the rest is history.

Yukihitomi / @arthurhonda: This is actually a funny story. So it was back in 2011, and my friend recommended it to me because I like history and was a history kid. It also had nekotalia, and I love cats. Combine the two, and it was a good recomendation. Ironically, she said "don't get into the fandom." Clearly, I didn't listen.

Ash / Lutz: A friend told me the anime was really funny so we watched a few episodes of it when we were in high school. I was hooked and almost immediately started googling amecan fanart lmao

Prush / @proosh: I can't remember exactly but I think my discovery of it was connected to the old DeviantArt series Scandinavia and the World? But it was around 2011, I'm pretty sure, and I got into it via the dubbed parts uploaded to Youtube. It activated me like a sleeper agent, having already had an early interest in history, and I've been trapped in here ever since.

Lacy: I randomly found the series while I was reading some news. (Think it was back in 2013-14). Sort of got very obsessed with it and was joining groups left and right, bought fktons of merch for a lot of characters. (i just love them all crazy at that point of time) One of the groups i was in decided to hold some event and thats where i wrote my first fic. Then theres so much stupid drama i just withdrew eventually and kept to myself with just one ship. (At this point there was this one person who was writing with me). Then came the time when she left as well, so I did question at that point if i still want to stay in this fandom alone (and i did, because i just want to finish up my wips 🫠).

Mossman / @one-more-mossman: I don't remember exactly how I did get into Hetalia , but I checked out the date of my first Hetalia pfp and it's December of 2012. I remember being super into Ivan and putting him on all my pfps and telling my friends about him and being all mushy and stupid. I had pretty limited access to the internet at that time, and didn't speak any English, so I wasn't a part of the Hetalia fandom - neither the English speaking nor Russian. So I didn't know he was an unstoppable rape truck y'know. I was drawing him and just silently vibing with him. I got into the actual fandom about three years ago - was a lurker first, not interacting aside from leaving kudos/comments, then got into fic writing (for English speaking fandom, I thought it was more lively than the Russian one). Found wonderful people here. Happy to be here, glad to have people sharing my interests. (Notice there is not a single mention of liking history. I don't like it. I can't remember a single fact.)

WhiteWings / @smuttyandabsurd: Gosh everyone started so much later than me... Anyway back in 2007, my sister forwarded a random USUK fanart to me on deviantArt simply because "it's BL and you might like it." I binged the first season of the anime and was tickled enough to keep watching as further seasons came out. I was already casually interested in history - it was my second favourite school subject behind English lit - but after Hetalia? Yeah I was reading the densest modern history nonfictions around, hovering in the military history section of the library among random middle-aged men, and writing rapetruck smutfics with a ~historical~ flavour. Anyway, 17 years later, everything from the way I consume Hetalia and tangentially-related topics to my writing has had a dramatic evolution from my humble weeb-y beginnings, but I'm still in this dang ass fandom and I can't find the exit.

Sicily: I was into countryhumans and I came across it, and was like, pft I'm never going to like hetalia.., and now we are here

[usafphantom2]

IMAGES: NATO Air Forces improve skills flying together over Lithuania 🇱🇹

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 01/26/2024 - 17:00 in Military

Allied aircraft from Belgium, France and Lithuania carried out training missions above Lithuania on January 23, conducting flights in close formation and air combat exercises to demonstrate skills and improve flight skills.

Integrated and combined training events of NATO fighter detachments in deployment are an excellent opportunity for Allied air crews. A Lithuanian Air Force C-27 transport aircraft took off from Siauliai Air Base and carried out training missions with Belgian F-16 fighters and French Mirage 2000. The flight was used to improve the readiness of the air crew and perform combined missions within the framework of NATO's Baltic Air Police.

"Integrated and combined training events of NATO fighter detachments in deployment are an excellent opportunity for the Allied air crew and are beneficial to aircraft controllers who ensure that the training is conducted safely and professionally," said Air Brigadier Michael Carver, Deputy Chief of Operations at the Allied Air Command in Ramstein, Germany.

The Belgian F-16s are currently leading NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission, and the French Mirage 2000 complement the mission. Both detachments are temporarily deployed in Lithuania, securing the skies over the three Baltic Allies.

“Belgium was the first NATO member deployed in the Baltic States. Twenty years later, our presence is even more important in light of current events. We are proud to be here as a reliable member of the Alliance to ensure security and stability at NATO borders," said Commander Laurant Wuillaume, Commander of the Belgian Detachment. “In addition to the Air Policing mission, the opportunity to train with our Allies daily improves interoperability and procedures between all members, increasing the preparation to react to any potential threat,” he added.

"This type of flight highlights all the easy coordination between NATO assets and highlights the specific skills necessary for such accurate flights," said Lieutenant-Colonel Georges, commander of the French Mirage 2000 detachment in Siauliai.

The Baltic Air Police mission is an example of NATO's regional security agreements. For 20 years, the Allies worked collectively to preserve the integrity of airspace above Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. On March 29, 2004, NATO's first jet fighter - a Belgian F-16 - landed at Siauliai Air Base to start 24/7/365 Rapid Alert services as part of NATO's new Baltic Air Policing mission.

The NATO Combined Air Operations Center in Uedem, Germany, has been responsible for leading the mission under NATO's Integrated Air Defense and Anti-Missile System or NATINAMDS.

Seventeen Allies have since taken turns protecting and preserving the integrity of the airspace of the Baltic States, deploying fighter detachments to Siauliai and, since 2014, also to Ämari in Estonia. From March to November 2024, NATO aircraft will conduct the mission from Lielvarde Air Base in Latvia, while Ämari Air Base undergoes repairs on the runway.

Tags: Military AviationNATO Baltic Air Policing MissionNATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[walkingthroughthisworld]

U.S. Army Soldiers with 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, join Lithuanian Speaker of Parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen during a tour of Camp Herkus, Lithuania Jan. 4. 2024. The 3rd Infantry Division’s mission in Europe is to engage in multinational training and exercises across the continent, working alongside NATO Allies and regional security partners to provide combat-credible forces to V Corps, America’s forward deployed corps in Europe. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Oscar Gollaz)

A U.S. Army Soldier with 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, and members of the Lithuanian Parliament take a close-up look at M1A2 Abrams tanks during a tour of Camp Herkus, Lithuania, Jan. 4, 2024. The 3rd Infantry Division’s mission in Europe is to engage in multinational training and exercises across the continent, working alongside NATO Allies and regional security partners to provide combat-credible forces to V Corps, America’s forward deployed corps in Europe. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Oscar Gollaz)

[nullnvoid911]

Members of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service during exercise PRIEDANGA 2023 on the Belarus border.

Arno Čemerkos / KAM, August 22, 2023

[captain-price-unofficially]

German Leopard 2A6 no. 132 participates in a NATO military exercise in Pabrade, Lithuania, October 2022.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Within the framework of "Iron Spear 2024", a firing competition for tank and infantry fighting vehicle teams will be organized to determine the best crew among the nations represented in the brigade and the invited units of Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. The exercise is always keenly contested.

"Iron Spear" exercises have been taking place in Adaži since 2017 and have become a military tradition, giving soldiers the opportunity to share knowledge, tactics and equipment, as well as compete with each other for the title of the best crew.

[mariacallous]

MONS, Belgium—It was the summer of 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine was 6 months old. NATO officials feared more than ever that they would one day have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to fight and die against the Russians.

With war on NATO’s doorstep, the alliance faced an existential question: Was it up to the job of defending every square inch of its turf? Christopher Cavoli, the four-star U.S. Army general tapped as the alliance’s military chief that July, decided it wasn’t.

Cavoli ordered his top lieutenants to come up with a plan to transform Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE)—NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, which had lost most of its power after the Cold War—into a proper war command center.

“His initial guidance and direction that started all of this was: I need to be able to command,” said Col. Bryan Frizzelle, the project manager for SHAPE’s strategic warfighting headquarters.

The effort to remake the alliance’s headquarters is just one element in the most ambitious military reforms that NATO has embarked on in years. NATO is growing the size of its response force by eightfold. The war room in Mons has been remade to call up troop reinforcements and map out long-range military strikes on Russian soil even before a war breaks out. For the first time, NATO forces are exercising those brand new war plans in Europe’s hinterlands this spring.

The plans could take years more to put in place. “We are talking decades—potentially plural,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow for the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

But the war in Ukraine is already 2 years old. Most NATO nations are struggling to boost defense spending and produce artillery shells. Russia’s military is reconstituting faster than anyone expected. And the United States is just nine months away from a presidential election in which the Republican front-runner, former U.S. President Donald Trump, is already openly questioning whether the United States would help enforce Article 5—the self-defense clause at the heart of NATO—if he is elected as U.S. president.

All of this means that the alliance may not have decades to get its act together. “That’s the open question,” Wasser said. “Does NATO actually have that time?”

The first thing you see at SHAPE is the bunker. Built in 1985, when NATO’s military headquarters had a Soviet nuclear target on its back, the massive concrete structure looms over the parking lot. It’s not built to withstand a modern Russian nuclear blast—you can’t dig deep enough to shelter from that—but it’s a symbol of what SHAPE used to be at the height of the Cold War: the central nervous system of NATO’s 3 million troops and 100 army divisions in Europe.

It’s also where a group of NATO planners from a half-dozen countries took the first steps toward rebuilding the sleepy military command. As the Kremlin was building up more than 100,000 troops to invade Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, NATO scrambled jets, rolled tanks, and hardened the eastern flank with more than 8,000 troops from 30 countries. NATO once again needed a central nervous system to command them.

Anyone who worked at SHAPE had an open invitation to join a planning session in the bunker on a Saturday afternoon in late fall of 2022. Few did. Of the nearly 3,000 people who work at SHAPE, just 30 people showed up. That ragtag group of volunteers who committed to work nights and weekends became the so-called “Tiger Team” that would remake—and is still remaking—NATO’s military headquarters for war.

The team members came from all over the headquarters and hailed from all across Europe, including Denmark, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom. Some got roped in on long email chains by their bosses. Some told their colleagues about it and convinced them to join. Frizzelle told a few of them himself. Kenneth Boesgaard, a Danish special operations officer, found out the agenda had very little to do with special operations, but he went anyway. The fear of missing out was too strong.

They didn’t waste any time. Led by a three-star French Army general, they went right after NATO’s sacred cows. The two-hour discussion became the foundation for a series of “hard truths.” SHAPE was no longer useful. It was built for peacetime, not to fend off a Russian attack. It was no longer “fit for purpose,” Frizzelle said.

The group had homework: to deliver an update to Cavoli in just eight weeks, cutting through four ranks in the chain of command. And they had only four full-time planners.

By December 2022, they had written a first draft of SHAPE’s new job description. It had about a half-dozen major bullet points. It included planning for war as well as resourcing and commanding it. SHAPE also still had to advise NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on military policy and take the 31-nation political commitments that come out of NATO summits—carefully worded and littered with diplomatic jargon—and turn them into military reality: sensors, shooters, troops, and brigades on the ground.

Then they had to get the rest of the headquarters to buy in. “[In] NATO, you’ve got to build consensus,” said Lt. Col. Alex Price, a British Army officer involved in the project. “I’ve learned that the hard way.” The Tiger Team didn’t need any convincing. But the biggest problem was getting the rest of SHAPE to understand what a “strategic warfighting headquarters” was supposed to do.

The job of the command is to say who goes where—whether it’s a bomber, a fighter jet, or a rocket artillery system—and what they’re going to hit. For years, it was the other way around. NATO’s three joint force commands, which are meant to divide up responsibility for security in Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean and report back to Mons, did most of SHAPE’s job for it. They ran the show in the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Afghanistan, where NATO’s military might was mostly delivered in airstrikes, not boots on the ground to stop Russian tanks.

By the time Putin invaded Ukraine, about 80 percent of SHAPE’s work was reporting to Stoltenberg, NATO’s civilian leader. “We were not in charge,” said French Army Lt. Gen. Hubert Cottereau, SHAPE’s vice chief of staff, who oversees the headquarters transformation effort.

That worked in the small wars of the 1990s. But computer simulations quickly made it clear that that approach wouldn’t work on a larger scale. In one digital exercise in September 2022, officials at Naples, Italy, the hub of NATO’s naval forces, and Brunssum, Netherlands, the nerve center for NATO ground troops, told SHAPE to step aside: Just give them the shooters, sensors, and troops, and they would plot out the targets.

Once the simulated bullets started flying in NATO’s digitized war with “Occasus”—a bloc of four fictional Russia-like countries—the lower-level commanders hit a wall. Who would prioritize the main effort? Who would give them the resources? And who would call up the reserves?

They needed SHAPE to do it.

Cavoli didn’t go easy on the Tiger Team. The group had missed a key bullet point: strategic targeting. If Putin ever ordered Russian troops onto NATO soil, Cavoli knew he would need to be able to strike back, hitting targets deep inside Russia to paralyze the Kremlin’s war industry and break their logistical chains.

Dating back to the end of the Cold War, most NATO countries wanted to make nice with Russia. Few were comfortable with identifying military targets in the Kremlin’s backyard, fearing that first Boris Yeltsin, and then Putin, would see it as warmongering. So they gave that power away.

“We discovered that SHAPE actually in peacetime had no targeting authorities because that was politically sensitive,” Frizzelle said. If a war had broken out, NATO military planners would have had to start planning out Russian targets from scratch.

Ukraine changed everything. In the summer of 2023, during the annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the alliance unanimously granted SHAPE the ability to conduct targeting. Now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, SHAPE is using that authority—in peacetime. NATO planners are deciding what would be valid targets on Russian soil, plotting them out for Naples, Brunssum, and NATO’s U.S.-based command in Norfolk, Virginia, and running the potential bull’s-eyes through all of the legal traps.

Cavoli needed to get NATO’s eyes on the target, too. Until last summer, SHAPE’s around-the-clock watch center had only a dozen seats. After a three-month construction project, the center now fits a workforce of 85 people, seven times as big as it was.

Left: SHAPE’s new headquarters appears under construction in Mons on March 21, 1967. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images   Right: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (second from right) walks with outgoing and incoming Supreme Allied Commander Europe generals toward a change-of-command ceremony at SHAPE in Mons on May 4, 2016. Thierry Monasse/AFP via Getty Images

It’s not just a watch center, though. Officials see it as a nerve center of all of NATO’s military operations. By putting all of the experts in one room, within a few minutes, a few chair swivels, and a couple of phone calls, the new multidomain operations team can quickly give Cavoli and his aides-de-camp everything they need to respond to a Russian attack.

“Let’s say there’s a report of a Russian rocket or part of a drone landing in Romania,” Frizzelle said. “The senior watch officer can turn around in her chair and say, ‘OK, we have this report. Give me the geographic subject matter expert.’” They can brief Cavoli within a few minutes of getting the alert.

They’re still getting all of the right people in place. In a crisis, there’s no time to be flipping through the phone book; SHAPE needs officers in the bunker who can immediately direct it to NATO’s land, air, and maritime commanders. The idea is to be able to connect from Mons to a shooter on the eastern flank if war breaks out—almost instantly.

“The key to effective deterrence is the demonstrated capability to inflict real pain on Russia,” said Ben Hodges, a former head of U.S. Army Europe who is now a NATO senior mentor for logistics. “If you want to prevent the Russians from making a terrible decision, then that means we have to be able to move as fast—or faster—than them.”

Two years into Russia’s invasion, NATO nations have now put 150,000 ground troops on the eastern flank. But NATO has no troops of its own. It has no tanks. It has no fighter jets. It’s the job of each country to get its troops, tanks, and planes ready to go when the alliance asks for them.

“The biggest catastrophe can be summed up in two words,” Cottereau said. “Too late.”

For decades, SHAPE had very little power over troops in NATO countries. But Russia’s invasion prompted those nations to give Cavoli more authority. He can adjust the level of air defense cover in Europe. He can move NATO’s two standing maritime task forces at sea. He can scale up the eight battlegroups on Russia’s border from battalions, with just over 1,000 troops, all the way up to brigades, which are at least three times that size. Some of them are already on the way.

Cavoli still can’t order troops to fire, but he can order more troops to move into place—or get ready to move. And he now has at his command 300,000 troops ready to exercise and respond to a crisis—almost eight times what he had before the war. It’s called the Allied Response Force.

Once it’s activated in July, the newly readied force will be trained twice a year: once for a pre-crisis simulation and again for an out-of-area operation that simulates a real war. The aim is to send a clear message to Russia: Keep out.

“Every ship that sails, every aircraft that flies, every tank that rolls sends a message,” said Gunnar Bruegner, the one-star German general who serves as assistant chief of staff to Cavoli for developing and training NATO’s forces. “We are ready.”

The new force is intended to be the tip of NATO’s spear, similar to the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, the Pentagon’s on-call force of paratroopers that deployed to Afghanistan for the 2021 evacuation effort and then served as the boots on the ground in Poland when Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine started.

The next stage is to keep a larger reserve of forces prepared for an Article 5-level war, distinct from the eastern flank battlegroups, that would be the size of somewhere between the 300,000-troop rapid response force and the 3.2 million-plus troops in NATO’s 31 militaries. Each unit will be assigned its own patch of dirt to defend and will exercise based on NATO’s war plans. Cavoli could order some of those troops to be ready immediately, more at a month’s notice, and even more in six months.

“That’s the kind of process we’re going through now,” said a NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the alliance. “[We’re] going to allies and saying, ‘What have you got? What could you stick on the table in an Article 5 situation?’”

Although defense spending in Europe has grown by almost a third in the past decade and as many as 20 countries could hit the alliance’s 2 percent defense spending target this year, there’s an ongoing give-and-take. In NATO, members have the control button by providing the money and the troops. Just one ally saying “no” can cause a major headache. Greece refused to participate in airstrikes on the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. During NATO’s 2011 intervention to shut down Libya’s skies, Germany refused to provide its early warning aircraft.

The NATO official said European nations are going to have to invest more in weapons systems and training that they’ve been leaning on the Americans to provide, such as air and missile defense, long-range artillery and missiles, command and control, and land combat formations.

And the biggest question mark is Trump. Again the Republican front-runner in the 2024 election, the former president is publicly throwing cold water on NATO’s self-defense pledge. If European nations don’t pay up for defense, he said at a campaign rally this month, he would encourage Russia to attack them. (NATO officials fired back: While the alliance gives nations a defense spending target, it is not a dues-paying group. “This is not a country club,” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told CNN.)

Trump’s rhetoric might not have been an existential issue for NATO in the days of voluntary operations such as Kosovo and Libya. But after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, everything has changed.

“Article 5 is fundamentally different,” the NATO official said. “Everybody is on the hook.”

When he was Estonia’s defense chief, between 2016 and 2017, Margus Tsahkna and his aides counted more than 120,000 Russian troops massed on the other side of the country’s Baltic border. Putin could send those troops into battle within 24 to 48 hours. “All that was needed was the command from the Kremlin,” said Tsahkna, now Estonia’s top diplomat.

The invasion never came. Today, two years after Russian troops began to roll over the border into Ukraine, most of the soldiers arrayed against the borders of the three former Soviet nations on NATO’s eastern flank—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are gone. Many of them have fought and died in Ukraine.

It may not be an all-out invasion of the Baltic states that’s coming. After all, more than 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured in Ukraine. It could be a hybrid attack, too—cyberattacks, the cutting of pipelines, or a limited invasion to undermine Western confidence in Article 5 that’s already been damaged by Trump. But either way, there’s a growing fear in the West that Russia is already picking itself up off the mat much faster than anyone expected.

The question is not just when a Russian attack might come but where.

“[Putin] will continue. He must continue the aggression. He needs to have a new conflict somewhere,” Tsahkna said. “Testing NATO, is it Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland? I don’t know. [But] it’s not even a question.”

Estonian officials believe that Putin is planning to put two to three times more firepower against the borders with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland than it did before the Ukraine war. And Putin is making up for Russia’s combat losses, expanding the size of the military to more than 1.3 million troops, only a bit smaller than the U.S. armed forces.

NATO planners said last October that they were following expert estimates that Russia could reconstitute in a three-to-five-year period after the shooting stops in Ukraine, with Russian land forces degraded but much of the rest of the military intact. But Russia’s military comeback has accelerated. Some European officials now believe Russia could attack NATO directly. This month, Denmark’s defense minister said Russia could test Article 5 within three to five years.

So NATO’s planning has accelerated, too.

This year’s ongoing Steadfast Defender exercise, which started in January and won’t end until May, will top out at 90,000 troops—only about a quarter of them American. Marines from three countries will ship out of Norfolk aboard the USS Gunston Hall and launch an amphibious assault to take back the beaches of Norway. Then NATO’s highest-readiness troops will assault across the Vistula River in Poland.

It’s the alliance’s biggest military demonstration in 36 years. “If you’re Russia, you might say: ‘I can attack this spot here now, and maybe I’ve got a temporary advantage,’” the NATO official said. “But the knowledge that we can and will bring basically two full American corps to Europe—and they will fight—that is a pretty big deterrent.”

Another key reason for doing large-scale exercises so soon after Cavoli’s team put the plans on paper is to see what works and what doesn’t. How do you move land forces across Europe? How do you supply them? And when the shooting starts, will they arrive in time?

“There might be a big attack coming on NATO,” Bruegner said. “It gives you the bloody truth about what you really are capable of doing.”

Back in Mons, dozens of military officers from NATO countries huddled in the SHAPE bunker in October 2023 to test their latest plans in a 10-day exercise dubbed “Steadfast Jupiter.” This time, they were fighting off a fictional invasion of Eastern Europe from Occasus, their Russia-like foe.

In the end, SHAPE received more than a passing grade. The allies didn’t steamroll their enemy but degraded Occasus enough to the point that the mock conflict could end at the bargaining table.

Every three to four months, Frizzelle’s team emerges from the bunker to present Cavoli with another set of recommendations to change the SHAPE headquarters, each time wrenching down on more problems. In the October exercise, Cavoli and his team realized their rules of engagement were too strict—better suited for Afghanistan than Article 5. So they tweaked them.

Their next assignment is to present their work to all 31 NATO allies—and Sweden—at the upcoming Washington summit in July. It’s a chance for the civilian brass to grill Cavoli. “How far are we? How good are we at being able to execute the plans?” said Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee.

In the meantime, they’ve got more homework to do. SHAPE’s experts are still looking at how to optimize intelligence gathering, integrating artificial intelligence into the headquarters, and building out their own wargaming capability, with a team of experts who live, breathe, eat, and sleep Russian tactics as the “red team” on the other side.

The tweaking will continue as long as Cavoli is NATO’s military commander—at least for the next year and a half. But they’ll never be 100 percent sure that the war plans will work until the first shot is fired in an actual war.

“We’ve built an airplane—the new strategic warfighting headquarters,” Frizzelle said. “It’s informed by the blueprints of airplanes that have flown well in the past. But until we fly the airplane, we don’t know how it’s going to handle. We don’t know if we’ve forgotten a part.”

“Hopefully,” he added. “We haven’t.”

[head-post]

France prepares army for confrontation with Russia as part of NATO drills

French troops will take part in a large-scale military exercise called Dacian Spring 2025 in Romania, according to Politico.

The drills, to be held next May, would assess France’s ability to shift rapidly to NATO’s eastern flank in the event of a perceived threat. The head of the Army’s land command in Europe, General Bertrand Toujouse, said on Friday, 4 October, that such exercises should be treated as “strategic signals.”

We used to play war. Now there’s a designated enemy, and we train with people with whom we’d actually go to war.

In the last few years, French ground forces began a “profound transformation” to be ready for a high-intensity conflict similar to the war in Ukraine. Paris also received new orders from NATO to be able to deploy a combat-ready division in 30 days, including ammunition and supplies, by 2027.

The French army will train to send a combat-ready brigade to Romania in 10 days. The interim step, if successful, will reaffirm France’s credibility with NATO allies and pave the way for the 2027 goal.

However, defence spending must be in line with France’s seven-year military planning law to meet the 2027 target, General Pierre Schill, commander of the French army, warned. The defence budget is under pressure as France’s new government seeks to curb the country’s deficit.

I expect the planned resources to be there in full. If there are major changes, at some point we may delay [the 2027 objective], saying that there aren’t enough stocks to take them into combat.

Militarisation gaining momentum

Lithuania was also holding Gelezinis Vilkas 2024-II (Iron Wolf 2024-II) drills involving troops from NATO countries, the Ministry of National Defence revealed on Monday.

The international exercise Gelezinis Vilkas 2024-II begins on 7 October. Until 17 October, the exercise will take place at the General Sylvester Žukauskas Training Range. More than 3,200 Lithuanian and allied soldiers with 700 pieces of military equipment will take part.

Soldiers from the United States, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Luxembourg take part in the drills aimed at fully integrating NATO’s forward battle group.

In the face of a growing threat near its borders, Russia announced an updated nuclear doctrine. Moscow made the announcement to rule out further escalation and dispel doubts about the country’s readiness to “ensure its security by all available means,” according to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko. He emphasised that Russia’s actions were a response to NATO’s “provocative” actions.

Read more HERE

[victorysp]

King Willem-Alexander paid a visit to Dutch soldiers in Lithuania. They contribute to NATO's reinforced presence on Europe's eastern border. During the visit, the King participated in an exercise. Afterwards he talked to soldiers. Feb. 21, 2023.

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