US to hold largest Europe exercise in 25 years

Next April 20,000 US troops will cross the Atlantic to join US troops stationed there and European troops to practice moving through Europe towards its Eastern borders. It will be the largest such exercise since the end of the Cold War.

The United States will send 20,000 troops to Europe next April and May in its biggest military exercises on European soil since the Cold War to underscore Washington's commitment to NATO, a senior allied commander said on Tuesday.

Days after a NATO summit in London at which U.S. President Donald Trump called low-spending European allies "delinquent", U.S. Major General Barre Seguin said the exercises, centred on Germany, will be the largest of their kind in 25 years.

"This really demonstrates transatlantic unity and the U.S. commitment to NATO," Seguin, who oversees allied operations from NATO's military headquarters in Belgium, told Reuters.

Eager to deter Russia from any repeat of its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the U.S. Army will test its ability to transport the soldiers across the Atlantic to Belgium and the Netherlands and then move quickly east through Germany into Poland and along NATO's eastern flank.

The soldiers will join U.S. personnel stationed across the continent, as well as militaries from 18 NATO allies, to mass around 37,000 troops, before returning to the United States, in an echo of the 'Return of Forces to Germany', or 'REFORGER' manoeuvres, of the 1980s.

"We have not demonstrated this ability to rapidly reinforce, from a transatlantic perspective ... for 25 years or so," said Seguin, saying he recalled the REFORGER manoeuvres as a boy in school in Germany.