Pentagon and NATO military bases and other facilities succeed wars as night does day: Camp Eagle in Bosnia, the 1,000-acre Camp Bondsteel and its companion site Camp Monteith in Kosovo, Camp Able Sentry in Macedonia and, most recently, dozens more in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as several neighboring nations.
NATO's Allied Joint Force Command Naples, activated in 2004, overseas Kosovo Force (KFOR), the NATO Training Mission-Iraq [3], NATO Headquarters in Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia, and a Military Liaison Office in Serbia.
The seven NATO members that didn't dispatch troops to Iraq have sent them to Afghanistan, with Canada, France and Germany among the top six troop contributors, and several NATO partnership affiliates that didn't provide troops for Multi-National Force -"Iraq have joined them: Partnership for Peace members Austria, Finland, Ireland, Montenegro (which became independent in 2006), Sweden and Switzerland; Mediterranean Dialogue members Jordan and Egypt; Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Finland, which had not been engaged in combat operations since World War Two, and Sweden, which had not been at war in two hundred years, are in charge of four northern Afghan provinces under NATO command. Sweden has approximately 500 troops and Finland almost 200 in Afghanistan. Both countries have lost troops in the fighting there.
Australia, a NATO Contact Countries along with Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, has 1,550 troops in theater (including elite special forces), the largest contribution of any non-NATO nation. At least 21 Australian soldiers have been killed in NATO's Afghan war and 162 wounded, 62 last year.
The expansion of the Afghan war in the last days of the Bush and throughout the Obama administration, and its extension into neighboring Pakistan (with a population of over 170 million and nuclear weapons), has led to the highest-ever deaths among U.S., NATO and other ISAF contributing nations' soldiers.
This week Agence France-Presse reported that, based on official figures and other sources, over 10,000 people were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, among them 711 foreign soldiers, 810 Afghan government troops and thousands of Afghan civilians and insurgents.
The U.S. Navy announced on the first day of this year that the 1,000th sortie for the war in Afghanistan had been launched from the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea on December 28.
"Lincoln pulled in to the United Arab Emirates Dec. 23-27 with a total of 999 sorties flown supporting OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] and 76 sorties in support of Operation New Dawn (OND) during the ship's 2010-2011 deployment to the Middle East. The first launch after returning to sea marked the carrier's millennial OEF mission, amassing a total of more than 5,884 hours flown for OEF in just under four months." [4]
USA Today disclosed on January 2 that the U.S. Air Force doubled the number of joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) responsible for calling in air strikes - aerial bombings, missile attacks and strafing runs - from 53 in 2009 to 134 last year. In October of 2010 they coordinated over 1,000 missions "in which warplanes dropped bombs or fired missiles or guns, the most ever, topping the previous peak of 984 in June 2008." [5]
Last autumn the U.S. led a joint terminal attack controller exercise, Sabre Strike 11, at the Adazi Training Aria in Latvia with military personnel and warplanes from the host nation, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland.
"The purpose of this exercise was to continue mutual support for the fight in Afghanistan and demonstrate previous successful NATO coordination in Operation Iraqi Freedom."
The U.S. Air Force's 100th Air Refueling Wing "provided fuel to...Polish F-16s, which allowed the fighters to conduct bomb and strafing runs as coordinated by the NATO JTAC trainees and instructors. This marked the first time that live munitions were dropped in Latvia since their separation from Russia in 1992." [6]
The American armed forces publication Stars and Stripes wrote last October that "Faced with a critical shortage of joint terminal attack controllers, the Air Force has ramped up efforts to train more from allied nations, many of whom could deploy to Afghanistan to call in NATO airstrikes." [7]
At the time a five-week initial qualification class for JTACs conducted in Germany graduated troops from Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
According to the same source, the now retired U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander, General Roger Brady, instructed the school to double the amount of annual graduates from 72 to 144, and in 2009 General David Petraeus, now in charge of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, "highlighted in a memo to the Army and Air Force chiefs of staff the need for more JTACs, according to military officials."
In August and September of 2010 the U.S. and NATO held Exercise Ramstein Rover 2010 in the state of Wisconsin, "the first international exercise training NATO Forward Air Controllers (FACs) in the US" and "an advanced training opportunity to exercise Close Air Support (CAS), FAC and Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) capabilities." In addition to the U.S., participating NATO nations were Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia.
The exercise "prepare[d] NATO FACs/JTACs for their deployment to NATO's ISAF mission in Afghanistan." [8]
South of the Wisconsin border, last November the Illinois National Guard, which has been deploying to Poland since 2003 "for one-year tours in support of the Global War on Terror," trained Polish troops for NATO's war in Afghanistan. A Polish officer present for the event was quoted as affirming: "We train together because we fight together. If we train together we fight and work better in Afghanistan. It is good idea to train together before we deploy. We are good soldiers and our brigade was deployed in Iraq two times and in Afghanistan so we work at a high level. We are ready." [9]
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