Mar 21st 2011, 0:58:18
Well, France is the only NATO country that really has forces to spare, even with parts of the legion tied up in other african countrys and their marines spread thin around the world, the rest of NATO is pretty much depleted and worn out with Afghanistan and Iraq, as in, we can keep up the current force requirments, even if alot of countrys has had to resort to using their reserves and/or homeguard style forces (All creditt to these, but only active units should be sendt to war) it should be denoted that alot of countrys only use these forces for base defence etc to free up manpower in their active units to get more boots in the dirt.
With this said, the biggest strain ist on the grunts, its on the a) the levels above like brigade leadership/staff were you dont have enough to rotate with a decent amount of R6R b) the special forces, like engineers (from combat to IED teams) , medical support personel, Evac teams etc and c) the special operation forces , which are heavily involved in both current theaters and prob alot more countrys that we wont know about until 2050 or never, but they are still a sought after capacity and should we belive rumors, allready in-country.
To sum up, IF there should be a land intervention, alot of countrys outside of NATO would have to dip into their forcepools and send troops, and as any other country, ask themselfs, are we willing to risk our troops and public opinion, IF this scenario should become a reality, it shall be quite interesting to se what units are deployed, it seems the UN as the US and NATO has tried on many occasions lately, belive that airpower will win a war, but history has shown us over and over again that land forces are needed to hold a territory, airpower alone, as overwhelming as it can be, cannot.
I guess we are rooting for the rebels in Libya to pick up arms and themself overthrow the regime, because if they do not succed, the path we have started ends in an landbased intervention.
Praetor - disqualified from the human race for being three laps ahead in the second round.