I'm John Bachelor with Colonel Jeff McCausen in the United States Army retired artillery men,

CBS News.

The NATO exercise is fully underway, fully blossoming, 90,000 troops, an

enormous amount of equipment moving around. Jeff, you worked at NATO quite some

time, so help us understand what these exercises do for NATO.

A ships at sea, the the Marines and Army and other elements deploying in the woods in late winter.

How does this help?

Well, it helps in a number of ways,

it helps obviously in terms of training,

not only from the individual soldier

or the individual pilot or the individual ship,

but their ability to conduct what we call

combined arms operations, that including air, land, and sea

and integrating combat power, which is a very, very difficult proposition,

number one

number two it's an exercise of command and control

can we command and control military forces and military forces

that are provided from a whole bunch of different countries

and thirdly that brings us to questions of interoperability.

Can we interoperate together? And one of the key questions of interoperability is can we

communicate together when you have secure radio or digital communications or do we have the ability to still communicate across national formations.

And then last was certainly not least, it's a test test of logistics really a very important test of

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