Drills

‘We got zero notice’: Army resumes Cold War-era snap deployments to Europe

The infantrymen of the 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment were in the middle of gunnery exercises in El Paso, Texas, on March 11 when the call came in from division headquarters: deploy to Poland.

“We got zero notice,” said Col. Chad Chalfont, commander of the 2nd Armored Brigade, 1st Armored Division, the battalion’s higher headquarters located on Cold War Road at Fort Bliss.

A week later, 1,500 brigade soldiers were bound for training grounds in western Poland in a deployment reminiscent of the Cold War, when no-notice mobilizations were a main feature of the military’s strategy for countering the old Soviet Union.

Now, the Army is relearning the art of snap deployments as it adapts to a new Pentagon strategy — known as Dynamic Force Employment — that calls upon the military as a whole to keep adversaries off balance with more unpredictable troop movements.

“We are going to see this on a regular basis,” said Maj. Gen. John Gronski, deputy commanding general for the Army National Guard at U.S. Army Europe. “For any of our adversaries anywhere, it is going to be unpredictable for them. And that is good for our national security. This is all about deterrence and readiness.”