News From Antiwar.com
U.S. Army Europe and Africa announced today that during the Swift Response 21 airborne military exercise last month along what is now called NATO’s Eastern Flank – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade ran a training exercise to practice seizing a decommissioned air base in Bulgaria that went terribly awry. In landing and attacking bunkers and other structures at the site in Cheshnegirovo the American paratroopers also assaulted a building that housed a private business with employees on site.
Nothing daunted, the Pentagon issued a release that stated “We always learn from these exercises and are fully investigating the cause of this mistake.” During the Clinton administration’s and NATO’s 78-day air and missile war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 a comparable “mistake” was made when a NATO warplane fired a missile into a house in a suburb of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. It’s not cer
Officials have just confirmed that a team of U.S. soldiers accidentally raided a Bulgarian olive oil equipment factory during a bungled NATO training exercise.
Soldiers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade were conducting training at the decommissioned Cheshnegirovo Air Base when they were seen storming the factory.