NATO Partnership for Peace allies and candidates Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine have provided forces for one or more of the above missions, in several cases for all three.
The West's post-Cold War military colonies are levied not only for bases on their territory but for troops and military hardware to be used in wars abroad.
When this May the Pentagon moved a Patriot missile battery and over 100 troops into Morag, Poland - 35 miles from the border with Russia's Kaliningrad district - it was not for NATO's first ground war in Afghanistan or against an imaginary missile threat from Iran. A Polish newspaper account of the ongoing Jackal Stone 10 special forces exercise - "US army to show its strength in Poland" - pulled no punches: "NATO is in the process of developing contingency plans to defend Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania against Russian attacks the first time since the end of the Cold War that NATO has specifically identified Russia as a potential threat." [8]
Poland's fellow Visegrad Four member Slovakia hosted the NATO Military Committee, which consists of 450 military officers from all 28 member states, on September 17-19. The conference was attended by NATO's two top military commanders, Admiral James Stavridis (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) and General Stà ©phane Abrial (Supreme Allied Commander Transformation). General David Petraeus, commander of 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, participated via video conference. The gathering focused on military operations in Afghanistan and Kosovo and on the new Strategic Concept to be adopted at the bloc's summit in Lisbon in November.
Slovakia joined NATO five years after its Visegrad partners the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland because its citizens consistently voted in federal elections in a manner displeasing to Washington and Brussels, evidently preferring the notion that a government ought to represent the interests of the nation rather than those of the U.S. and should uphold the rights of its own people over those of the American president and NATO secretary general. NATO demands political subservience as well as warfighting and weapons interoperability.
After a compliant government was installed and Slovak troops had been dispatched to Iraq, the nation was brought into NATO in 2004. Its forces, like those of 16 other new NATO member states and partners, were transferred to Afghanistan beginning in December of 2008, much as NATO is now redeploying troops from Kosovo to the same war theater. It is hard to believe that many (if any) Slovaks are convinced that sending their sons and daughters to Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan in any fashion contributes to their nation's defense and security.
Slovak troops that have been sent to the three war zones have had the opportunity to renew acquaintances with their former fellow countrymen from the Czech Republic. The European Union has formed a 2,500-troop Czech-Slovak battlegroup.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Brussels on September 17 and confirmed that "Presence in NATO s Afghan mission is a long-term priority of the new Czech government."
Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra recently disclosed that he had submitted a proposal to the Czech government for streamlining the procedure for deploying and maintaining troops abroad to circumvent oversight in the parliament where opposition parties can scrutinize the deployments. Vondra wants to shift troops from NATO's mission in Kosovo to its war in Afghanistan where there are now 530 Czechs deployed, and Necas "would like the current system of approving missions for one year only to be extended to two years...." [9] On September 23 Vondra announced that 200 more Czech troops are headed to the Afghan war front and that the nation's special forces are to resume combat operations there.
Popular and parliamentary objections will not be allowed to interfere with NATO obligations.
A government report of earlier this month detailed that Czech overseas military missions cost almost three billion crowns last year, up by half a billion from the preceding year. The 2009 expenditure for Afghanistan was forecast to be 1.73 billion crowns but rose to 2.32 billion crowns.
It was recently reported in an article called "Czech military strategy looks toward U.S." that former Czech defense minister and current NATO Assistant Secretary General Jiri Sedivy (the first Czech to be appointed to such a major NATO post) is heading up a team of 15 security and international relations experts drafting a white paper on the transformation of the country's armed forces.
"The new strategic concept of NATO will be one of the important works in creating" the white paper, a Defense Ministry spokesman recently stated, in fact asserting that "NATO initiatives will take precedence." He added that "The ambition is that three quarters of the armed forces of the Czech Republic are consistent with NATO standards." [10]
This past weekend a "two-day NATO Days military air show" was held in Moravia and attended by 205,000 observers. "One of the major attractions was a U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress strategic bomber. The aircraft, which was deployed in the Vietnam war, in the Persian Gulf war, in the bombing of Yugoslavia and in the recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, is on the territory of Central Europe for the first time ever." [11]
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher has recently reconfirmed American interests in basing an interceptor missile radar facility in the Czech Republic to complement missile deployments in Romania and Poland. NATO plans radar sites near Nepolisy in Bohemia and in Slavkov (Austerlitz) in Moravia.
On July 27, 2009 officials from NATO and 12 participating nations - NATO members the U.S., Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania and Slovenia and Partnership for Peace allies Finland and Sweden - were present for the activation of the "first-of-its-kind multinational strategic airlift unit" [12] at the Papa Air Base in Hungary, which in the interim has been used extensively for the war in Afghanistan.
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