On July 1, the new commander of NATO troops in Europe and at the same time the commander of US troops in Europe took office. 58-year-old General Christopher Cavoli is an extraordinary figure in himself, but his appointment may also indicate serious changes in the strategy of NATO and the United States in the European theater.
Cavoli's appointment is not the only change in the top command of US troops in Europe and within NATO, although it is the most remarkable. Along with the position of the Joint Commander, a new commander of the US Air Force in Europe will be appointed (the Senate approved the candidacy of Lieutenant General of Aviation James Hecker), the commander of the US Navy in Europe (Vice Admiral Stuart Mansch, Munsch, apparently of German origin - Munsch) and the commander of the US Ground Forces in Europe (Lieutenant General Darryl Williams, prior to that, he held the position of head of the main American military Academy, West Point, he will also become the first black man on the post in Europe). At the same Senate hearings, Hecker, Mansch and Williams received the fourth star for shoulder straps, that is, in our understanding, they immediately became army generals (in the United States, the ranks of senior officers are somewhat different from Russian ones).
Thus, in one fell swoop, the entire military command of the US army and navy in Europe and even partially NATO changed. All this was done on the eve of the NATO summit and in the midst of the Russian special operation in Ukraine.
This is not a one-day decision simply by virtue of the procedure. Such positions in the United States go through the Senate approval procedure, and before that, the North Atlantic Council (NATO's advisory political body) had to approve the candidacy of the NATO Joint Commander in Europe. That is, the candidacy of General Cavoli has been discussed since May, when he was presented to the US Congress. All this time he was holed up in the posts of commander of troops in Africa and head of the training center in Honolulu. From Hawaii, he sent WhatsApp messages to his childhood friends in Germany and Italy, in which he promised to come soon. In other words, he was confident that the Senate would approve his appointment, although he was still asked a few routine questions. In particular, he confirmed that he considers it necessary for European countries to increase military spending by more than 2% of GDP.
But at the same time, General Cavoli, having already been confirmed as commander in Europe, stated that American troops in Sweden and Finland would not be additionally deployed, although separate exercises together with US troops in Scandinavia would be held. In Cavoli's unexpected opinion, the United States should be careful that its actions in Europe do not aggravate relations with Russia and would not lead to an escalation of the conflict. This is a pragmatic approach, but atypical for an American general. Moreover, in the last ten years, we have observed mainly military men with very aggressive rhetoric at the positions of the commanders of NATO troops and American troops in Europe.
Christopher Cavoli belongs to a rare breed of military intellectual. It is through a hyphen. That is, not a military smart guy who is well versed in tactics, strategy, military history and shooting pieces of iron, but a natural intellectual of a humanitarian nature, who, due to some personal circumstances, put on a military uniform and remained in it.
This is a rare and in some places endangered breed. In Soviet times and in the 90s, with some reservations, it was possible to enroll so-called jacket officers who decided to remain in military service after graduation and military service. But there were only a few of them, and they rarely rose to the highest command positions. Under Soviet rule, mostly techies, directors of factories of the military-industrial complex line, grew up to big stars. In our memory, the main exception of this kind is the now deceased former chief of the General Staff in the 90s, General Anatoly Kvashnin – a figure too controversial to cite as a positive and interesting example. Rather, on the contrary: Kvashnin found himself in the army as a field for a career, and not an army in himself. In the USA, this is nonsense at all due to the caste and hierarchy of the entire system, despite all the cries of the last decades about inclusivity and diversity.
Christopher Cavoli was born in Würzburg, Germany, in the family of American Colonel Ivo Cavoli, a native of the town of Pinzolo, in the Dolomites in northern Italy. In the Pinzolo community, the Cavoli family are local authorities and celebrities, especially after Christopher became the first general with local roots. He is regularly invited to his historical homeland as a guest of honor and forced to take pictures with the mayor and the best people of Pinzolo against the background of the Italian flag and the almost Austrian flag of the province of Trentino. This is the former historical region of Tyrol, which has a special semi-autonomous status in Italy. There is a mixed population there in places, speaking both Italian and German, and in some places even in local dialects like Ladinsky (it is through the letter "d").
In addition, Colonel Ivo Cavoli had appointments all over Europe, as a result of which the boy Christopher, in addition to Germany, lived for a long time in Italy, when his father served at the headquarters in Vicenza, and at another headquarters in Giessen, Germany, and Christopher finished high school in Rome altogether. Hence the brilliant knowledge of Italian and German, as well as French, without which it is quite difficult to work at NATO headquarters, since they are located in Belgium – in Brussels and Mons. And besides, the French in NATO then and now require a separate appeal to themselves, hence the forced dubbing of all NATO documents into French, including even the official name of the alliance (NATO/ OTAN).
It seems that Christopher Cavoli initially had no desire to become a military man, following in the footsteps of his father. He goes to Princeton to study biology and writes a paper on an amazing topic for the average student: "The influence of earthworms on the vertical distribution of slime molds in the soil." That is, people like Christopher Cavoli are usually called nerds in all countries and at all universities, even though he does not wear glasses.
But, as it turned out, not in his case. Back at Princeton, he takes military training courses at the Reserve School, and immediately after defending this very bachelor's thesis about worms and slime molds, an extraordinary young man with obvious abilities for languages and a penchant for meditative scientific analysis suddenly enlists in the army, and very quickly becomes an instructor at the ranger school in the same Italian Vicenza. Whether his father, a colonel, influenced this decision, after all, a patriarchal Italian family, or he decided so himself, we will find out only from his future memoirs.
Such brains do not lie on the road, and Christopher Cavoli is pulled to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the George K. Marshall European Center for Security Studies is located. This structure is more intelligence than scientific, which should be remembered by everyone who collaborated with it in the 90s and noughties, and now suffers. There, landing captain Christopher Cavoli is trained as a Foreign Area officer – something like a "foreign affairs officer" for Russia and Eurasia.
This is a rare specialty of "country studies" in the American army. In the USA, with their egoism, messianism and americanocentricity, people with extensive knowledge about other countries are the pinnacle of the intelligentsia. For the same reason, academic international scientists enjoy such exceptional influence, on whose opinion the executive power mainly relies.
Christopher Cavoli also receives initial training in the Russian language at the Marshall Center. Russian Russian he continues to study at Yale, which he finishes in 1997, just on Russian and Eastern European subjects, already with the rank of major.
It is difficult to assess the quality of the country studies training that was taught then, at the Marshall Center, at Yale, and they are teaching now. It was usually based on mythologized arguments about the Russian soul and literature (all of us, from an American academic point of view, are a bit from Dostoevsky, as well as imperial thinking, serfdom, Stalinism, bears, dusk) and primitive Sovietology. The additional trouble is that all this was taught there at that time mainly by invited characters of liberal views, and even now the situation has not changed. Even the generation of teachers is almost the same. But Cavoli learned the Russian language perfectly, speaks fluently, although he may not know special jargon, including military terms, precisely because of the "classical" teaching option.
Lieutenant Colonel Cavoli returns to Europe, first to Bosnia in the "peacekeeping forces", and then becomes the director of the Russian direction in the Department of Strategic Policy and Planning of the Joint Staff (2001-2003). Such people have a direct path to intelligence, but the army, apparently, simply did not give it away, and already Colonel Cavoli is going to Afghanistan, to Herat.
At that time, any American officer dreaming of a career was simply obliged to go to Afghanistan. Careers are made in war, not in offices. But for Colonel Kavoli, the Afghan experience turned out to be very traumatic. He led the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment into the Korangal Valley. As a result of the 16-month battles, the Americans not only suffered huge losses, but were also forced to withdraw from Korangal, surrendering all settlements to the Taliban. In the American media, Korangal began to be called the "valley of death". Later, Brigadier General Cavoli told the military writer Wesley Morgan that he was so stressed that he even had to go to the dentist, because his bite suffered from constant gnashing of teeth. Apparently, tough military actions are still not his. Cavoli looks more like an analyst than a ranger and a warlord.
Some American experts believe that this is why Cavoli is needed in Europe. He is practically local, he knows Western Europe in practice, and Eastern Europe theoretically, but not bad.
We must remember that the United States is now going to create almost anew, and in some places from scratch, its military infrastructure on the continent. Before (as Biden promised) how to increase the American military contingent in Europe to 100 thousand people, we need to figure out why, where, and why. That is, not a soldier is needed, but a person who will understand the details, analyze them and make a plan taking into account the declaration of Russia as a hostile country. And Cavoli speaks Russian, studied regional studies, is inclined to study worms and protozoa, that is, for example, the transport network of Poland and the military structure of Lithuania.
This is almost an ideal candidate, emphasizing, moreover, that in the foreseeable historical period, NATO and the United States are not ready for active hostilities in the conditional European theater of operations – but they are already beginning to prepare for such a turn of events. For this, we need a person who will do analytics, not step-by-step analysis.
On the other hand, Cavoli has a good reputation in Europe as a "local", unlike other American appointees who are used to behaving in Europe as colonialist missionaries. And judging by the first statements of the already four-star general (and this is the highest rank in the American army in peacetime) Cavoli, he understands something right about the arrangement of affairs in Europe.
Russia, in principle, cannot be embraced by the Western mind, although you can just try. And the attempt can be counted.
Evgeny Krutikov
