Steadfast Defender 2024: Key Facts About NATO’s Largest Drills Since 1988

Tensions between Russia and NATO have reached a dangerous historic low point, with the Western bloc actively sponsoring a proxy war against Moscow in Ukraine while engaging in a troop buildup on Russia’s borders. In the middle of the crisis, the bloc has decided to stage its largest military exercises since 1988. Here’s what we know about them.

NATO kicked off the active phase of its massive Steadfast Defender 2024 drills on Thursday, with the more than four month-long drills set to last until the end of May.

Preparations for the drills began in late January with the transfer of weapons and equipment from North America to Europe via supply ship, including the US Navy landing ship Gunston Hall, which left Norfolk last Wednesday, and Canada’s Charlottetown supply ship, which left Halifax, Nova Scotia days later.

The drills will be split into two parts – the first taking place from February 1 and March 15 and consisting mainly of naval exercises, and the second kicking off on February 12 to May 31 in a demonstration of the alliance’s “multi-domain capabilities” on the ground, at sea, in the air, in space and in cyberspace.

How Many Troops are Involved?

The drills will involve some 90,000 troops from all 31 NATO countries plus Sweden (which is set to join the alliance later this year following the Turkish parliament’s approval of its membership bid last week), and will take place across the trans-Atlantic area, and constitute “the largest NATO exercises since the end of the Cold War.”

Military equipment involved will include over 1,100 combat vehicles, among them nearly 150 tanks and over 900 infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers and support equipment. In the air, drills will feature 80 aircraft, including F-15, F/A-18 and F-35 fighter jets, helicopters and what the Pentagon has said will be a “myriad” of drones. At sea, the exercises are set to incorporate over 50 warships, ranging from aircraft carriers and destroyers to frigates and corvettes.

NATO Steadfast Defender Exercise 2024

© Sputnik

Not since the 1980s has the Western bloc engaged in drills of such a scale, with troop numbers involved surpassed only by the Exercise Reforger drills in 1988, which involved around 125,000 mostly American, West German, Canadian, French and Danish troops and constituted the largest European ground maneuver by the Western allies since World War II.

A lot has changed since 1988, with the NATO alliance pushing from 1,000-1,500 km eastward and incorporating 16 new nations into the bloc, including every single former member of the defunct Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance, three former Soviet republics and four republics of the former Yugoslavia. NATO moved forward with plans to expand into Eastern Europe in spite of an explicit commitment to Moscow in 1990 not to move “one inch east” beyond a reunified Germany after the German Democratic Republic’s annexation by the Federal Republic. The alliance’s push to incorporate neutral Ukraine into the bloc after the 2008 Bucharest Summit and the 2014 Euromaidan coup d’état became one of the central factors behind the escalation of tensions with Russia into a full-blown proxy war.

Where are the Steadfast Defender Drills Taking Place?

The Steadfast Defender drills are taking place across tens of thousands of square kilometers in multiple regions, from ‘maritime reinforcement’ exercises in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, to deployments in the Nordic countries, including in Finland, Sweden and Norway, the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, respectively), Poland, Hungary and Romania, as well as Germany, Greece, Slovakia and the United Kingdom.

NATO claims planning for the exercises was done "years in advance," with the final battle plans reportedly drawn up during last year’s NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

How Have Russia and Its Partners Reacted?

The alliance says it’s using a “fictitious scenario” in which an attack on an ally “by a near-peer adversary” triggers Article 5 of the NATO Charter and kicks off a major war. “NATO exercises are not directed against any country,” the bloc has assured.

But NATO Military Committee chairman Admiral Rob Bauer spilled the beans on the exercises’ true purpose last month, echoing a chorus of recent statements by NATO country officials that the alliance is “preparing for conflict with Russia.”

In December, President Biden claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin would attack NATO if he was allowed to “win” in Ukraine. Putin characterized Biden’s words as “complete nonsense” and said Russia “has no reason, no geopolitical interest, neither economic, political nor military – to fight with NATO countries.”

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov echoed Putin’s sentiments at a briefing this week. “They directly say ‘if Russia wins and defends its interests in this war, then the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland will be next’,” Lavrov said. “The absurdity of such statements is clear to anyone who understands history in the slightest degree, and understands the goals that we have openly announced regarding the special military operation in Ukraine,” he added.

Lavrov emphasized that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was aimed in part at neutralizing a potential “springboard” for NATO, led by the United States “to threaten the security of the Russian Federation.”

The Kremlin has no illusions about the purpose of the wargames. “The exercises are unprecedented, and they do not hide who they conducting these exercises against,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week as the first phase of the Steadfast Defender drills kicked off.

China Military, the official English-language news portal of the People’s Liberation Army, republished a story from the Global Times on Thursday characterizing the exercises as “a repeat of Cold War confrontation,” and accused NATO of waging a propaganda war against its own publics that a conflict with Russia is “inevitable.”

The article characterized the wargames as a clear attempt to “exert military pressure on Russia,” to “gain support from EU citizens for its anti-Russia policies, and justify further defense spending and economic pressure on Russia.” The result will include a “further” escalation of tensions in Europe, complemented by heightened global tensions facilitated by the bloc’s attempts to expand into the Asia-Pacific region.

As it has done in the past, Russia’s military will keep a close eye out on the NATO exercises using the array of tools at its disposal, from satellite, cyber and human intelligence to radar, aerial, ship and ground-based monitoring, particularly during periods when the drills approach Russia’s borders in Kaliningrad, the northeastern Baltic Sea, the Finnish border and the Arctic region.