Steadfast Defender 2024: What to know About NATO’s Biggest Drills Since Cold War

 

Steadfast Defender 2024: What to know About NATO’s Biggest Drills Since Cold War 

The Western alliance has kicked off the active phase of its Steadfast Defender military exercises. 

Over 90,000 troops from all 31 NATO countries plus Sweden (which is expected to join the bloc later this year) are involved, along with over 1,100 combat vehicles. 80 aircraft are involved, ranging from F-15, FA-18 and F-35 fighters to helicopters and drones, and 50 warships, from corvettes and frigates to destroyers and aircraft carriers. 

The drills are taking place across the Transatlantic area, from the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to the Nordics, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary and Romania, to Germany, Greece, Slovakia and the UK. NATO says the exercises will be a “multi-domain exercise incorporating land, air, sea, cyber and space operations.” 

The wargames center around a “fictitious scenario” in which an unnamed “near-peer adversary” attacks a NATO member and triggers the alliance charter’s Article 5 on collective defense. But Russia has made clear that it has “no illusions” about the drills’ true purpose, and who they are being conducted against. 

The Steadfast Defender drills are the largest of their kind since Exercise Reforger in 1988, which involved around 125,000 NATO troops. 34 years later, the Western alliance has pushed between 1,000 and 1,500 km eastward toward the Russian border, swallowing up 15 (soon to be 16) new countries in the process, and pumping over $200 billion in military and economic support to its Ukrainian client state to fuel a proxy war designed to “weaken Russia.” The alliance’s expansion took place despite promises to Moscow not to move “one inch east” beyond a reunified Germany in 1990.