NATO and the SDSR. Sort of. Kind of. In two minutes.

So after all that worrying in the end my great Internet blackout lasted all of about 8 hours. Happy days.

Time is short however and so I'm going to condense my thinking down into the shortest possible post. And what I'm thinking is this; with all this hullabaloo over Russia knocking on NATO's door, why not kill two birds with one stone? The two birds being to present a united front against Russia and to facilitate cooperative training among NATO allies. The solution would come from expanding the standing maritime task group concept and create a series of air, land and sea groups within NATO, with member countries rotating units through and rotating command of them. At the same time as providing conventional deterrence and rapid reaction units for various NATO tasks they would also be the core of large(er) scale NATO exercises.

So the Baltic mission could be expanded to a standing air wing with several squadrons rotating through on a regular basis. On the ground there would be perhaps a brigades worth of light infantry, centred on a position where they could provide rapid response across the region. Based in Poland could perhaps be one or two NATO armoured divisions, with countries rotating their armoured brigades through. A NATO air group could also be based in Poland. Romania (spellcheck can f**k off, I know that's correct) could also host one or two divisions, depending probably more on various countries willingness to pitch in than anything else. Perhaps one armoured division and one mountain, to let NATO's mountain warfare forces get a bit of large scale cross training in too. Add air group.

At sea the obvious choices for task groups would be the north sea/north Atlantic, the Baltic sea and the med. The first of those could (re: should) be a real area of interest for the UK, with the ability to host and take the lead in a primarily anti-submarine focused task group, one that would often find itself with access to carrier air cover (eventually) through the new QE-class carriers and provide NATO nations with the chance to gain a tremendous amount of training in open ocean anti-submarine operations, hopefully with some of our local allies pitching in with their non-nuclear subs for training and operations. A sub-group of this could be a NATO amphibious assault division, with various nations pitching in their amphibs (and troops, obviously) for regular exercises in the region. Perhaps the med group would have its own version as well?

And so on and so forth, you get the general idea. Everyone seems very, very concerned about the Russians all of a sudden, while also being very, very concerned about the future of UK strategy. Yet everybody seems to be asking questions and nobody seems to be offering answers. Hopefully this post will jog the discussion towards the answers, which in the UK's case is going to have to involve no mystical pots of money (it's not coming. It's really not) and doing what the UK has always done best; build alliances by pitching in with expertise and manpower (not so much money these days) to get everyone else moving. See Waterloo, Minden, etc, etc, for examples.