Bloomberg Businessweek quotes VP and Brent Scowcroft Center Director Barry Pavel on what NATO involvement in Eastern Europe might look like:
U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, will present his plans for strengthening collective security in Europe today to the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s political body.
Barry Pavel, a former career U.S. Defense Department official who served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said he’d be surprised if Breedlove’s plans for reassurance and deterrence don’t include deploying ground forces to eastern European NATO members such as Poland, Lithuania or Latvia.
“You’ll see a brigade doing rotational presence, for example,” said Pavel. “You’ll see a squadron of aircraft, moving through here and there. You’ll see a bigger grouping of naval ships, maybe a Marine unit — the Marines in particular have a good relationship with Romania.”
“You’ll see pre-positioned materiel, I’ve been hearing this, which is: ’Let’s put a bunch of ground equipment back in Europe so that an army unit can quickly meet up with it in a crisis, and then use it and move to a contingency location,’” said Pavel, director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group.