[WarZone] To the casual observer, the scene might’ve looked like an odd cross between a reenactment of a past war and a demonstration of a future conflict. Elite special operators, some of whom were speaking foreign languages, were roving around the hills of West Virginia on foot, horseback, all-terrain vehicles, and by helicopter, while practicing specialized tactics, some of which are nearly a century old.
But this wasn’t another remake of the movie Red Dawn or a weird time-traveling short story. It was a real life, routine exercise called Ridge Runner 2017 that occurred in February 2017. The particular group of participants ‐ including special operators from the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of whom are NATO members ‐ and certain practice sessions suggested the event had a lot to do with Russia’s increasingly revanchist polices in Europe. |