Cold War, Part II: Excellent Corporate Welfare Program For Defense Industry (pictire)

Russian spies … proxy wars … aerial standoffs. Today’s headlines are just like old times for Cold War veterans. The Soviet Union is gone but tension between Russia and the West is very much alive.

Is this new, colder war necessary? Plenty of folks on both sides say no, but it’s happening anyway. Maybe, we should all get used to that idea. 

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In Friday’s U.S. Troops Head to Ukraine and again yesterday in Greeks Eye the Grexit, I reported the rising odds of American military involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Yet, Ukraine is only one potential battlefield. Europe contains many more.

Leaders in other countries worry about a resurgent Russia, too. They’re asking Washington for help… and the Obama Administration seems very willing to answer.

Sunday’s Stars & Stripes U.S. military newspaper featured this interesting story:

Army looking to store tanks, equipment in eastern Europe

U.S. Army Europe will soon dispatch a survey team to eastern Europe to scout locations for tanks and other military hardware as part of a broader effort to bolster the U.S. military presence in a region rattled by Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the Army’s top commander in Europe said Friday.

“We are doing surveys here in the next few weeks up in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria to see if there is a place where perhaps some of that equipment could be stored there,” USAREUR chief Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges said during an interview with Stars and Stripes. “Maybe it’s a company, maybe it’s a whole battalion, we don’t know yet until we do the survey.”

General Hodges was in Kiev last week discussing plans to train Ukrainian National Guard troops. He described that operation in similarly vague terms. Are the plans really so unclear, or is he just being coy? I don’t know – but I feel confident this is only the beginning of something bigger.

Cold War veterans might recognize the plan to pre-position tanks and other equipment close to the potential war zone. In the 1960s through the 1980s, the U.S. maintained vast European warehouses for the same purpose under a program called POMCUS.

The plan was that in a crisis, U.S.-based armored divisions would fly their troops to Germany, where they would jump right in to the POMCUS vehicles and head for the battlefield.

Fortunately, we never found out if that plan would have worked. I suspect the warehouses would have been a prime target for Soviet missiles long before the stateside troops arrived.

Now, we’re about to do essentially the same thing again, a little further east and on a smaller scale (so far).

A POMCUS revival will be great news for defense contractors. They’ll get to sell the Pentagon two of everything – one to store in Europe, and another back at home with the soldiers. MOREHERE