By Theodore Shoebat

The US military has been having serious talks about moving a very formidable missile defense system to Germany to strengthen “European defenses,” according to two sources who are close to the situation. Although some people who are studying this potential action warn that such a move could spark tensions with Russia.

The name of this missile system is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) with a very effective Raytheon Co (RTN.N) AN/TPY-2 radar, to shootdown short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, as we read in a report by Reuters.

The proposal to move THAAD to Germany came before the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran deal. Rather the proposal comes from an advocacy towards boosting European air and missile defense.

Here is a video of a test for THAAD:

Supposedly, the Americans are concerned that the Iranians, with their Shahab 3 missiles — which are said to have the capability to travel travel 2,000 km — will aim and fire on the Europeans. While one German official says that there needs to be more radars across Europe to better monitor potential threats, Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon has said:

“There are currently no plans to station THAAD systems in Germany. We do not discuss potential future military planning, as we would not want to signal our intent to potential adversaries. Germany remains among our closest partners and strongest allies”

But there is something else that Pahon said:

“We do not discuss potential future military planning, as we would not want to signal our intent to potential adversaries”

He says that there is no plan to give Germany the missile system, but then he says that “We do not discuss potential future military planning,” which basically means that we cannot trust his first statement.

One US military official said that there has been preliminary talks about establishing the THAAD system to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, headquarters for the U.S. Air Force in Europe and NATO Allied Air Command. “It would be a further political message to the Europeans that we’re serious about protecting our allies,” said the official. U.S. General Curtis Scaparrotti, head of U.S. EuropeanCommand, said:

“The initial assessment is that Germany would very likely not have a problem with a THAAD deployment”

Of course they wouldn’t. Germany right now is increasing its military spending at levels not seen in decades. If the Germans are going to bring back their military might, they are going to need serious military technology, and so they would of course welcome with open arms such a missile defense system. If war in Europe is on the horizon, then Germany is going to prepare, and they are preparing. People will argue that there is going to be no war in Europe between Europeans. But can one point to a single century when Europeans did not kill each other?

Even when the Europeans were having conflict with the Muslims, they still killed each other. Richard the Lionheart had to give up his fight in the Middle East to war against the French who were trying to steal his lands. Europeans have always killed each other. It was just in the 1990s when the Slavs of the Balkans were tearing each other apart, and it was only in 2014 when the Russians and Ukrainians were killing each other in a conflict in which horrific atrocities were committed. Why, then, is it so far fetched to say that Europeans will slaughter each other in a major war, when such a thing is nothing new under the sun? “History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The Germany military is in fact working to engineer its own short- and medium-range missile defenses, according to a report from Reuters. The Germans will be modeling their missile defense system from other apparatuses, studying the Arrow 3 anti-missile system built by Israel and the United States, a spokesman said.   

That the US has been talking about giving the Germans this powerful missile system to boost up their defense is another indication of what we at shoebat.com have been saying for a while now: when the Trump administration stressed that the Europeans “must pay what they owe” for their own defense, the Americans wanted to give the green light to the Germans to increase their military capacity.

It reminds me of how the United States empowered the industrial economy of Germany after World War Two so that the German mark could act as support for the American greenback. Now the Germans are taking the 2% GPD spending requirement and going beyond it, pushing for even more spending than the NATO standard requirement. The idea that NATO is pushing for a surge in European nationalism is not far fetched, given the fact that it was NATO that operated the clandestine “stay behind” insurgent units in Europe, having them commit terrorist attacks and blame them on the Soviet Union in order to spark ultra nationalism, as part of a plan known as Operation Gladio. The first major politician to reveal the Gladio plan was Guilio Andreotti, who served as the 41st prime minister of Italy. Andreotti produced a document which revealed that “the operation, on account of its current forms of organization and application — as foreseen by NATO directives and integrated into its relative planning — is to be carried out and refined in a framework of absolute secrecy.”

Andreotti also revealed:

“Once the clandestine resistance organization was constituted, Italy was called upon to participate … in the works of the CCP (Clandestine Planning Committee) of 1959, operating within the ambit of SHAPE [NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe] … ; in 1964 the Italian secret service also entered the ACC (Allied Clandestine Committee).”

In the year 2000, the Italian parliamentary commission wrote up a conclusion to their investigation on the Gladio operations, affirming that the terrorist attacks that were committed in Europe (especially the Bologna massacre in 1980 and Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969), were done by agents linked to the Italian government and the CIA:

“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”

In 1974, neo-nazis detonated a bomb at an anti-fascist rally, killing eight people and injuring 102. In 2015, the Italian appeal court sentenced Carlo Maria Maggi to life imprisonment for coordinating and ordering the massacre.

Magi was in contact with General Maggi Braschi, who was in fact close to NATO. In May of 1965, General Braschi was a speaker at a conference in Rome — in the fancy Parco dei Principi hotel — organized by the Istituto Alberto Polio, a think-tank that was well connected to the Italian armed forces. (See Anna Cento Bull, Italian Neofascism) The Alberto Polio Institute was a front group for SIFAR (the Italian military intelligence from 1949 to 1965) and the CIA. The topic of the conference was “Counter-Revolutionary Warfare” and “the defense of Italy from Communism by all means”. One of the ideas endorsed in the conference was that “the Third World War is already under way, even if it is being fought at a low level of military intensity.” (See Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, ch. 6, p. 75)

Why was NATO backing an operation such as Gladio? Because, as is reported, they believed that by supporting the Nazis they could create paramilitary force that would conduct false flag attacks to use as propaganda against the Soviet Union. NATO is now encouraging and helping Germany have a stronger military, and there are people who are warning that this could intensify tensions with Russia. Again, here we have NATO arming people ‘because Russia.’ It is part of the same pattern. We saw this with the CIA’s arming of Islamists in Afghanistan, with the pretext being of course, the threat of the Soviets. The people who worked to fully Islamize Afghanistan were the same people who worked to spark to revive ultra nationalism, Fascism and Nazism in Europe in Operation Gladio. This policy did not change, and can be seen in the US’ backing of the neo-Nazi paramilitary group, Azov Battalion in its fight against the Russian military during the 2014 conflict in Crimea. As we read in a report from the Daily Beast: 

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv of the Azov battalion talks about his battalion’s experience with U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers quite fondly, even mentioning U.S. volunteers engineers and medics that are still currently assisting them. He also talks about the significant and active support from the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. As for the training they have and continue to receive from numerous foreign armed forces.

Azov should not have been getting any arms in accordance to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, originally sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, known as “the Leahy Vetting Process.”  Under this act, the US cannot give arms or training to anyone involved in “gross human rights violations.” But there is a loophole, and that is that most of these paramilitary fighters have not been confirmed to be involved in human rights violations. Moreover, the Ukrainian government, in regard to providing fighters, does not have very much of a filter process, and can accept arms and support without adequately providing sufficient information as to whom the arms are going. As the Daily Beast reports:

They also say that Azov members are screened out, yet no one seems to know precisely how that’s done. In fact, given the way the Ukrainian government operates, it’s almost impossible.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Interior brings what one U.S. official calls a “mishmash” of troops, consisting of volunteers, members of militia battalions and official army to be trained, and the Leahy process exists to check and see if any have committed a “gross violation of human rights,” which most likely they have not—at least not yet. 

 “Whether or not some may be in the lineup, that is possible. But frankly, you know, our vetting screens for human rights violations, not for ideology. Neo-Nazis, you know, can join the U.S. army too. The battalions that are in question have been integrated as part of Ukraine’s National Guard, and so the idea is that they would be eligible for training, but in all honesty I cannot tell you if there are any on the list we train. There were not any in the first rotation as far as I am aware. … “It’s a mishmash of folks: volunteers, soldiers, war heroes, Maidan veterans—I mean I couldn’t tell you, you know, short of investigating the background of each guy.”

“I’ve seen Roman Catholics; I’ve seen Mormon soldiers on the ground both U.S. and Ukrainian; I’ve seen Latter Day Saints; I just haven’t seen anything too crazy or anything you wouldn’t expect from any other military.”

When asked if there are any Jewish Ukrainian forces he replies, “You know that’s a fair question and one I can’t answer. I know on the U.S. side we’ve had Jewish soldiers here. I don’t know for the Ukrainians.”