NATO Trains Georgian Troops For Global Response Force
Rick Rozoff
The website of the Georgian Defense Ministry reports that troops from the South Caucasus nation have recently undergone intensive training at the U.S. Army Europe’s Joint Multinational Command Training Center in Hohenfels, Germany in preparation for incorporation into the NATO Response Force.
The 12th Battalion of the 1st Infantry Brigade completed what was described as special training within the framework of the NATO Operational Capabilities Concept.
The Georgian forces participated in both command post and field exercises in Germany after ten months of previous training in their homeland where the U.S. Defense Department has trained local troops since 2002 for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and, whether deliberately or otherwise, for Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia and war with Russia six years ago this August.
The Defense Ministry’s account of the recently concluded training did not identify the nationality or nationalities of the officers who ran the exercises, although it is to be assumed that they were from the U.S. and other NATO nations.
Georgia is one of four NATO candidates selected by the U.S.-dominated military alliance to join the Response Force. The other three are Ukraine, Sweden and Finland.
The U.S. and its Western military allies have paired Georgia and Ukraine for simultaneous NATO accession since at least 2008 when, at the bloc’s summit in Bucharest, Romania, they were assured of eventual full membership. The month after the war with Russia, September 2008, NATO established a NATO-Georgia Commission and two months afterwards granted both Georgia and Ukraine an Annual National Programme, a modality employed for the first time to circumvent or substitute for the traditional Membership Action Plan which is the final stage before full accession.
It is worth noting that the inauguration of NATO’s Response Force, described by NATO as “a mechanism to generate a high readiness and technologically advanced force package made up of land, air, sea and special force components that can be deployed quickly on operations wherever needed,” occurred in 2006 with massive land-air-naval exercises in Cape Verde off the western coast of Africa code-named Steadfast Jaguar. The war games lasted two weeks and consisted of 7,000 troops as well as over 600 vehicles and the flagship of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, USS Mount Whitney, which in the interim has paid visits to the Black Sea, including to Georgia less than a month after the August 2008 war with Russia.
The military alliance specifies the role of the Response Force as including, in reference to NATO’s collective military obligation clause, “providing an immediate response capability for conducting collective defence of Alliance members in the event of an Article 5 operation” and “acting as the initial force deployment as a precursor to deployment of a much larger force, whether that be for Article 5 or for any other operation.”
Decidedly, Georgian military forces are not being prepared for humanitarian operations.
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