COMMENTARY / Japan

How can Europe deter Putin? Revive the ‘Reforger.’

This shelved Cold War military exercise may be needed to thwart Russian aggression

German and U.S. soldiers participate in Allied Spirit 24, a multinational training exercise, in Hohenfels, Germany, in March 2024. Reforger, NATO’s massive Cold War-era exercise to rush U.S. troops to Europe, was shelved after the Soviet collapse. But with Vladimir Putin attacking neighbors, maybe it’s time to revive it. | Bloomberg

By James Stavridis
Bloomberg

May 28, 2025

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 U.S. troops stationed in Europe at the height of the Cold War.

At the time, only 16 countries were in NATO (today there are 32). The event was not just an exercise — it was an actual planning and execution demonstration of NATO’s defensive war plans. It required the forces to "marry up” with their huge stockpiles of equipment on NATO’s eastern flank, called Prepositioning of Materiel Configured in Unit Sets (POMCUS) sites.