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Of the nearly 3,000 people who work at SHAPE, just 30 people showed up. NATO once again needed a central nervous system to command them.Īnyone who worked at SHAPE had an open invitation to join a planning session in the bunker on a Saturday afternoon in late fall of 2022. As the Kremlin was building up more than 100,000 troops to invade Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, NATO scrambled jets, rolled tanks, and hardened the eastern flank with more than 8,000 troops from 30 countries. It’s also where a group of NATO planners from a half-dozen countries took the first steps toward rebuilding the sleepy military command. It’s not built to withstand a modern Russian nuclear blast-you can’t dig deep enough to shelter from that-but it’s a symbol of what SHAPE used to be at the height of the Cold War: the central nervous system of NATO’s 3 million troops and 100 army divisions in Europe. Built in 1985, when NATO’s military headquarters had a Soviet nuclear target on its back, the massive concrete structure looms over the parking lot. The first thing you see at SHAPE is the bunker. president.Īll of this means that the alliance may not have decades to get its act together. President Donald Trump, is already openly questioning whether the United States would help enforce Article 5-the self-defense clause at the heart of NATO-if he is elected as U.S. And the United States is just nine months away from a presidential election in which the Republican front-runner, former U.S. Russia’s military is reconstituting faster than anyone expected. Most NATO nations are struggling to boost defense spending and produce artillery shells. “We are talking decades-potentially plural,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow for the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.īut the war in Ukraine is already 2 years old.
The plans could take years more to put in place. For the first time, NATO forces are exercising those brand new war plans in Europe’s hinterlands this spring. The war room in Mons has been remade to call up troop reinforcements and map out long-range military strikes on Russian soil even before a war breaks out. NATO is growing the size of its response force by eightfold. The effort to remake the alliance’s headquarters is just one element in the most ambitious military reforms that NATO has embarked on in years. Bryan Frizzelle, the project manager for SHAPE’s strategic warfighting headquarters. “His initial guidance and direction that started all of this was: I need to be able to command,” said Col. Army general tapped as the alliance’s military chief that July, decided it wasn’t.Ĭavoli ordered his top lieutenants to come up with a plan to transform Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE)-NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, which had lost most of its power after the Cold War-into a proper war command center. With war on NATO’s doorstep, the alliance faced an existential question: Was it up to the job of defending every square inch of its turf? Christopher Cavoli, the four-star U.S. NATO officials feared more than ever that they would one day have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to fight and die against the Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine was 6 months old.