NATO Launches Exercise with 90,000 Troops, Largest in Decades

The rehearsal—referred to as "Steadfast Defender 24"—aims to demonstrate how U.S. forces and the alliance would reinforce the Euro-Atlantic during a "simulated emerging conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary," NATO said. The exercise includes more than 80 air platforms, including F-35 Lightning IIs, F/A-18 Hornets, Harriers, F-15 Eagles, helicopters, and uncrewed aerial vehicles.

The maneuvers represent a “record number of troops that we can bring to bear and have an exercise within that size, across the alliance, across the ocean from the U.S. to Europe," Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of the NATO Military Committee, said in a PBS report.

The exercise is the largest since the Cold War and largely seen as a show of force meant to send a signal of deterrence to Russia.

"For the first time in 30 years, we have the strategy—deterrence and defense of the Euro-Atlantic area—and we have the plans to make the Alliance fit for the purpose of collective territorial defense," General Christopher Cavoli, the supreme allied commander in Europe, said Thursday. "We are now in the process of making our plans executable. This means making sure we have the force commitments, command and control arrangements, and the enablement our plans require."

While NATO did not reference Russia directly, the rehearsal of U.S. forces supporting allies on the eastern flank prompted a rebuke from a top Russian official Sunday, according to Reuters.

"These exercises are another element of the hybrid war unleashed by the West against Russia,"  Alexander Grushko, Russia's deputy foreign minister,  told Russian state news agency RIA, according to a Reuters report. "An exercise of this scale...marks the final and irrevocable return of NATO to the Cold War schemes, when the military planning process, resources, and infrastructure are being prepared for confrontation with Russia."

"Steadfast Defender 24" is scheduled to run through the end of May.