soldiering in neutral countries in prep for war against the rooskies...

soldiering

US Marines disembarked from convertibles and helicopters from the amphibious attack ship « Iwo Jima », and « secured » Keflavik airport in Island, where Poseidon P-8A aircraft had arrived from Sigonella to take part in the hunt for enemy submarines. That was the start, on 17 October, of the NATO exercise Trident Juncture 2018, whose principal phase will be taking place from 25 October to 7 November in Central and Eastern Norway, in the areas adjacent to the North Atlantic (as far as Iceland) and the Baltic Sea (including the airspace of Sweden and Finland).

The armed forces of the 29 member states of NATO will be taking part, plus those of their two partners, Sweden and Finland. Total deployment – approximately 50,000 men, 65 major ships, 250 aircraft, 10,000 tanks and other military vehicles. If they were lined up, one element behind the other, they would create a column 92 kilometres long. The commander of the exercise, one of the largest of the last few years, is Admiral James Foggo. Nominated by the Pentagon, like his predecessors, he is the commander of the Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) whose headquarters is in Lago Patria (Naples), the US Naval Forces in Europe, and the US Naval Forces for Africa, whose headquarters is in Naples Capodichino. The Admiral is commanding Trident Juncture 2018 from the « Mount Whitney », the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, transferred from Gaeta to the North Atlantic - a floating headquarters which is connected to the Pentagon’s global command and control network, including the Muos di Niscemi station in Sicily.

This confirms the importance of these US and NATO command centres and bases in Italy, not only for the Mediterranean, but also for the whole « area of responsibility » of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who is always a US General, currently Curtis Scaparrotti, nominated by the President of the United States. Since 2002, this geostrategic area « has been extended in order to cover all NATO operations, independent of their geographical situation ».

The official objective of Trident Juncture 2018 is to « ensure that NATO forces are ready to respond to any form of aggression wherever it may occur ».

But it’s enough to glance at the map to realise that this major war exercise is focused in only one direction – towards the East, against Russia. Admiral Foggo claims that the « Fourth Battle of the Atlantic » has already begun, after the battles of the two World Wars against German U-boats, and that of the Cold War against Soviet submarines: it is now being waged against Russia, the new « aggressive maritime power », whose « increasingly sophisticated submarines threaten NATO’s capacity to maintain maritime control of the North Atlantic, and consequently, the lines of maritime communication between the United States and Europe ». Turning the facts on their head, the Admiral claims that Russia « defies the presence of the United States and NATO » not only in the Atlantic, but also in the « Baltic and the Black Seas », in other words the seas which border European Russia.

Thus we discover the other finality of Trident Juncture 2018 - it’s a massive psyop (psychological operation) aimed at reinforcing the idea that Europe is under the threat of an increasingly aggressive Russia. In Sweden, a NATO partner country, 4.8 million families were handed a survival manual explaining how to prepare for war, by storing reserves of food and other essential goods, learning how to behave when the signals of alert are sounded to warn of the Russian attack. So NATO is preparing to swallow up even Sweden, an old « neutral » state.

Manlio Dinucci

Translation
Pete Kimberley

Source
Il Manifesto (Italy)

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203628.html

By Gus Leonisky at 28 Oct 2018 - 8:38pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
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preparing for the next european butchery...

The announcement that "Trump breaks the historic nuclear treaty with Moscow" - the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) - was no surprise. Now, however, it is official. To understand the scope of this act, we should review the historical context from which the INF Treaty was born.

The president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the INF in Washington, on Dec. 8, 1987, after having agreed on it the year before at the Reykjavik, Iceland, summit. According to the INF, the United States undertook to eliminate the "Euromissiles": the Pershing 2 ballistic missiles, deployed in Western Germany, and the land-based cruise missiles, deployed in Britain, Italy, Western Germany, Belgium and Holland. The Soviet Union committed to eliminating the SS-20 ballistic missiles, deployed on its territory.

The INF Treaty established not only a ceiling to the deployment of a specific category of nuclear missiles, but the elimination of all missiles in that category: By 1991 a total of 2,692 were eliminated. The limitation of the Treaty was that it eliminated short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles launched from land, but not those launched from sea and air. Nevertheless, the INF Treaty was a first step on the road to real nuclear disarmament.

This important result was essentially due to the "disarmament offensive" launched by the Soviet Union of Gorbachev: On Jan. 15, 1986, the Soviet Union had proposed not only to eliminate Soviet and U.S. mid-range missiles, but to implement a comprehensive three-stage programme to ban nuclear weapons by the year 2000. This project remained on paper because Washington took advantage of the crisis and the disintegration of the rival superpower to increase its strategic superiority, including its nuclear superiority. The United States thus remained the only superpower on the world stage.

It is no coincidence that Washington only called the INF Treaty into question when the United States saw its strategic advantage over Russia, China and other powers diminish. In 2014, the Obama administration accused Russia, without presenting any evidence, of having experimented with a cruise missile of the category prohibited by the Treaty. The administration announced that "the United States is considering the deployment of ground-based missiles in Europe," that is, the abandonment of the INF Treaty [1].

The Trump administration subsequently confirmed this plan: In fiscal year 2018, Congress authorised the financing of a research and development project for a cruise missile launched from the ground by a mobile platform on the road.

NATO’s European members support the plan. At the recent North Atlantic Council meeting held at the level of Ministers of Defense, Elizabeth Trenta (of the Five-Star Movement) represented Italy. There Trenta said that "the INF Treaty is in danger because of the actions of Russia," which she accused of deploying "a destabilizing missile system, which poses a serious risk to our security.

Moscow denies that this missile system violates the INF Treaty and, in turn, accuses Washington of having installed in Poland and Romania launch ramps of interceptor missiles (those of the "shield"), which can be used to launch cruise missiles with nuclear warheads.

According to reports leaked by the administration, the United States is preparing to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles launched from the ground not only in Europe against Russia, but also in the Pacific and Asia against China.

Manlio Dinucci

Translation
John Catalinotto

Source
Il Manifesto (Italy)

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203626.html

The Europeans should tell the Yanks to place their misslies in their arse, like when G W Bush had a colonoscopy... But they wont...

missiles