Dubbed Steadfast Defender 24, the alliance's large-scale maneuver involves some 90,000 troops from 32 countries and no fewer than 1,100 armored vehicles.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is no longer in hiding. After three decades of military retrenchment, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union two years later, NATO has decided to boost its capabilities in response to Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine and the threats made by its president, Vladimir Putin, to countries on Europe's eastern flank.
On January 24, the alliance launched Steadfast Defender 24, its largest series of military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Scheduled to last until May 31, these large-scale maneuvers bring together some 90,000 troops from 32 countries and no fewer than 1,100 armored vehicles, including 166 battle tanks. The exercises are taking place mainly on the plains of Poland and Norway, but also in Germany, the Baltic States, Romania, Finland, Slovakia, Greece and Sweden.
"This is our largest deployment since Exercise Reforger in 1988, in which 125,000 men were engaged," stated US General Randolph Staudenraus, head of operations at NATO's military command in Brunssum, Netherlands. Staudenraus came to Gdansk, Poland, on March 4 to supervise one of the two land exercises in the sequence, called Dragon 24."