How Can Europe Deter Putin? Revive the ‘Reforger’
The massive Cold War military exercise put a stop to Soviet aggression then, and it could do the same with Russia now.
Bulgarian and Spanish special military forces participate in the NATO exercise Steadfast Dart on February 13, 2025.
Photographer: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images
When I was a junior officer during the Cold War, the biggest North Atlantic Treaty Organization military training exercises — perhaps the largest in history — were annual drills called Exercise Reforger. The goal was to ensure NATO’s ability to deploy troops rapidly to West Germany if war broke out between the alliance and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact nations. “Reforger” was a loose acronym of “Return of Forces to Germany.”
The first Reforger was held in 1969, and they ran annually through 1993, just after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Forces from every country in the alliance participated, although the bulk of them were American — drawn from the 400,000 US troops stationed in Europe at the height of the Cold War.