Lithuania Tribune
July 18, 2014
NATO officer: exercises in Lithuania will be expanded, Russia has triggered a “security paradigm shift”
Exercises in Lithuania and NATO’s other Eastern member-states will be expanded in response to Russian actions in Ukraine, NATO’s Joint Forces Headquarters officer Lieutenant Colonel Hans Houf said after his team inspected Lithuania’s military infrastructure in Vilnius Friday.
Houf, the commander of NATO Forward Integration Team, said in an interview to BNS that an analysis is being carried out on a macro level in NATO about larger exercises in 2015, with plans adjusted to address Russian tactics and strategies.
“There will be a continuous increased presence for training and exercise purposes not only in Lithuania but in the complete Eastern part of the Alliance, in fact. It’s only the beginning. That’s an effort that we want to continue over time. It’s not only until the end of this year, for example, but we are already studying at the higher level within NATO to increase activity in the region in the coming years and fully integrate that into our annual training and exercise program,” said Houf.
“We think about how we could refocus our exercises, making those exercises more adaptable to the current crisis, to the new security environment that we are seeing, to the security paradigm shift, to the tactics and techniques and strategy that has been applied by the Russians for example, and how we can improve our reaction and our readiness to that,” he told BNS.
Source