Keep in mind France was not in NATO from 1966 to 2007/09 from de Gaulle to Sarkozy… which is why only US, Russia and France have the capability to make jet aircraft from scratch.
And if you leave an alliance like that, the next morning you find yourself surrounded by a powerful hostile alliance that can use all your weapons. It's not fun.
We were still in NATO, just not the integrated command, which is a huge difference.
Only idiots would willingly put their armies under foreign officers command and expect said army to defend their country interests.
If NATO was really an alliance and not a colonial administration, the integrated command simply wouldn't exist.
So what do you do when you get attacked and you've now got twenty something different countries with twenty something different armies and leaders all leading their countries in twenty something different directions? Your entire defense breaks apart.
You do the exact thing you had in WWII (or in WWI. Or in any war fought by any coalition ever).
You have a centralized commander in chief staff leading general staffs of different nationalities commanding their national units.
You do not break up divisions, brigades… sometime down to companies level, de facto evince their local superior officers to supplant them by someone else from your integrated command, making peace time national forces under a command THAT IS NOT UNDER ANY POLITICAL CONTROL.
NATO is national forces put under extraordinary entities outside national command staff. It might make sense for units that share an immediate border with themselves and the enemy (Denmark/West Germany/Netherlands, US and UK permanent forces in Germany and West-Germany) to have a permanent command (but a simple joint command, 1 guy with 3 stars and his staff, presumably a German, would suffice) for proper coordination in case of surprise attack, but not fucking Portugal!
That's even more true for rapid reaction forces (immediate->rapid->reserves, few->sizable->a lot, 24/7->36-72H->1 week) that have to mobilize under a NATO command literally within hours while their real (national) hierarchical superiors (let alone the people representatives) are at great risk of being de facto kept out of the loop (as the system is literally designed to do).
There is simply no reason for it. Rapid action forces IS A FUCKING FRENCH CONCEPT, they can perfectly be under a national command and you have an entire army corps with a national army level staff that once mobilized is simply under the NATO marshal/CIC, if needed or it's national staff.
Think of it this way Mexico and the US are allies (last time I checked).
Do you think the military governor (or whatever they have in Mexico) of Tijuana should be able to deploy battalions of the Californian National Guard without the US army being able to tell him to go fuck himself?
Of course not.
To give you a counter-example when Clarke ordered UK and French soldiers to assault the airfield in Kosovo held by Russian airborne and the officers on site refused, they checked with their national brigade leaders (as it was an ad hoc thing and NOT a NATO integrated command), said leaders took upon themselves to check with Paris and London (which of course gave them orders to back the fuck off).
If it was a NATO integrated operation, Clarke would have been well within his right of having everyone court martialed (refusing orders while engaged in a combat operation resulting in the seizure of a key strategic asset by an opposing force. Guidelines are pretty clear, it's a life/death sentence). Given the urgency he could have them all snatched up by MPs, replaced by his own officers and shot within the day and still be perfectly within his right.
To give you another counter example nearly all the forces that took part in the coup against Erdogan in 2016 in Turkey were NATO rapid reaction for south west Europe.
Soldiers were just told they were doing a snap drill, then that there was a coup…
Of course NATO and the usual suspects denied any involvement (they had no idea the guys literally in the room next to them were ordering bombings and helicopters runs on the country parliament and HQ… none).
Are baguettes natural autists or something?
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He answered your question.
I'm sorry, but I don't use Zig Forums to read. More than a full screen of text is far too much.
Is there a tl;dr version?
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