Anakonda-2016: NATO’s WW3 Rehearsal?

 

Roaring combat aircraft, low flying helicopters, tanks, APCs, long trains loaded with self-propelled artillery, radars, and assault bridging equipment. And all of it is heading East. But there’s no reason to worry, it’s not a war but simply the largest military exercise in decades, codenamed Anaconda-2016.

There are groups of young men near the Olsztyn power plant. They observe, take photos, and disappear. Two weeks later these same groups are spotted at the train station. In another town in the Mazury region, Gizycko, a few young men are seen near the local military base. They are interested in gates, security, the soldiers. They seem to belong to a paramilitary organization.

A few days later someone destroys the power lines. Gizycko is left without power. Fortunately the damage can be fixed but only a bit later there’s an explosion at the city administration. It’s not clear what happened: a bomb or a gas line explosion? People in the city are becoming nervous. Especially since local hospitals are beginning to admit people poisoned by milk from the Gizycko dairy plant. Something bad is happening in the area. Are these events coincidental, or are they the result of enemy sabotage? The crisis reaction team assembles in the city. The local police chief remembers the bands of young men. –Should we activate the military? he asks an officer from the operations section of the 15th Mechanized Brigade stationed in Gizycko, who was sent by his commander to the crisis team. Particularly since Gizycko is not the only city in Poland which is experiencing such tragedies…

This is how the beginning of a hybrid war or one of the Anakonda scenarios could look like. This year’s maneuvers will be exceptional. –We have never had an exercise preparations with such great energy and with such perfection, says Major Angieszka Kossowska from the Armed Forces Operational Command which is preparing the maneuvers. Everything will be exceptional, starting with the exercise script. The military will not be repelling enemy attack, as it had been doing since 2006, when Anakonda was organized for the first time. Now the army has to react to events below the so-called “war threshold”. It could be a terrorist attack, sabotage, externally promoted social unrest which destabilize the state.Until recently, however, the hypothetical geographical, historical, economic, political, and tactical background contained pretty simple assumptions: “Monada” and “Baria”–evil powers–attack the territory of “Vistulaland” on land, from sea, and from air, usually under the pretext of protecting national minorities. The military must stop their offensive and carry out an offensive counterstroke. But this time that scenario is absent. Instead we have, like in Ukraine, green men.–We have no designated aggressor in the scenario. We are assuming that paramilitary formations have penetrated our territory. They are observing important sites, performing sabotage. It’s the first time we are training pre-conflict procedures, says Lt. Col Piotr Walatek, the Operational Command’s spokesman. Therefore Anakonda will also entail checking the non-military crisis reaction system at the national level and in five selected provinces. The tactical background is also new. It will be the first time the Polish military will use the NATO exercise scenario codenamed Skolkan-1. Walatek does not want to reveal too many details of Anakonda. We do know that the exercise will be related to NATO Charter Article 5 which implies collective NATO response to an attack on a member state. Moreover, the soldiers themselves can’t know the actual scenario. –We want them to react to the situation on the go, says Walatek. This approach is praised by Gen. Roman Polko, the former commander of GROM spec ops unit and the former head of National Security Bureau. –We are often sugarcoating reality, and military exercises always must end in victory. That’s a big mistake. It made us lazy and didn’t teach us anything. In reality, if there are problems during exercises, it’s better for the troops. It allows these problems to be eliminated in the future.This year’s Anakonda will be exceptional due to its scale. It will involve 27 thousand troops, whereas in 2014 the total number of personnel was 12,500, including only 750 from countries outside Poland. But this time NATO allies will comprise more than half of forces engaged, from 19 NATO countries and six Partnership for Peace countries. US will provide 10,000 troops, the British about 1,000, the Spanish and the Germans will send several hundred each. This will demonstrate the alliance’s cohesion in the face of a potential threat. The exercise will take place on all the major training areas in Poland. To magnify the effect, the Baltops exercise will take place at the same time on the Baltic, with several dozen NATO ships engaged.