SZOLNOK, Hungary -- Secretive, behind-the-lines mission rehearsals and other operations by 1,400 U.S. and allied commandos to combat shifting Russian threats have laid bare a fundamental tension in President Donald Trump's administration: While the president courts Moscow, much of his government considers it an increasingly dangerous foe.
Just days before Trump made light of Russia's interference in U.S. elections during a meeting last month with President Vladimir Putin, teams of Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs were practicing support missions for local resistance forces in Eastern Europe and the Baltics in case they have to confront Russian commandos without insignia, the so-called little green men who helped Moscow seize Crimea in 2014.
Under a revamped Pentagon strategy to counter growing threats from Russia and China, U.S. commandos are teaming up with partners on Europe's eastern flank to thwart Russia's so-called hybrid warfare, which allied officials say increasingly involves manipulating events using a mix of subterfuge, cyberattacks and information warfare. The threats hearken back to Cold War-era intrigue, but so far are being waged with bytes and bandwidth, not bombs and bullets.
"This is back to the future," Gen. Richard Clarke, the head of the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, said in an interview. "Special Operations forces have to work on the edges to counter Russian aggression."
The two-week exercise in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania offered a window into shadowy so-called gray-zone operations, which are meant to stay below the threshold of inciting open conflict but always run the risk of touching off exactly what both sides are trying to avoid: a shooting war.
But in an unexpected geopolitical twist, American and Hungarian officers at the headquarters of Hungary's special operations forces in Szolnok, 60 miles east of Budapest, sought to stay far away from domestic politics in their countries and from questions about the close links with Moscow that their commanders in chief have embraced.
Trump gave Viktor Orban, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary and one of Europe's leading nationalists, a warm welcome in May despite concerns about Orban's rollback of democratic institutions and warming ties with Russia.
Once a leader in the move to adopt Western values when the Soviet bloc collapsed three decades ago, Hungary has charted a different course since Orban assumed office in 2010. Even though Hungary is a NATO ally, Orban's government has pressured nongovernmental organizations, taken most of the news media under control of his allies and upended the electoral process to favor his party.
During Orban's visit to Washington, Trump made no mention of the fact that Hungary spends only 1.15% of its economy on defense, proportionately one of the lowest in NATO, even though he routinely criticizes other leaders for not meeting the 2% goal set by the alliance. Likewise, Trump said nothing about Hungary's growing energy ties with Russia, unlike his repeated criticism of Germany on the same issue.
Meanwhile, Trump has dismissed bipartisan concerns about Russia, most recently last month when he warmly greeted and joked with Putin on the sidelines of an international summit in Japan.
When asked about these seeming contradictions, the top Hungarian and American officers overseeing the commando exercise exchanged glances and, after an awkward silence, chose their words carefully.
"Military-to-military relations are really resilient to what's going on in the political environment," Brig. Gen. Tamas Sandor, the head of Hungary's 1,000 special operations troops, said in an interview in his office. "I'm staying in my professional lane."
In many ways, Sandor's personal journey tracks the evolution of Eastern European militaries to NATO allies and post-9/11 comrades in the battlefields of Afghanistan from Cold War rivals.
Sandor, 52, joined the army as a cadet in the late 1980s, when Hungary was still part of the Warsaw Pact. He later trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; Fort Bragg, N.C.; and the National Defense University in Washington. He served three tours in Afghanistan alongside U.S. forces.
The general is a rabid fan of the New Orleans Saints football team, born from his admiration of the city that struggled to cope with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the year he lived in North Carolina.
Sitting across from him was Capt. Mark Schafer, 47, a member of the Navy SEALs who is heading the U.S.-led exercise in Hungary and in neighboring Bulgaria and Romania.
"We hear the background music; we're not deaf to it," Schafer, a native of Utica, N.Y., whose first taste of European conflict happened when he deployed to Bosnia in the late 1990s, said of the highly charged political discourse. He now commands 600 Navy SEALs on the East Coast and has deployed to war zones more than 15 times since Sept. 11, 2001.
"But as the operational commander," Schafer said, "I'm focused on our partnered capabilities. That's my mission."
The Special Operations exercise came at the same time as one of the largest U.S.-led exercises since Russia invaded Crimea. It involved thousands of other conventional American and European troops and some 50 ships staging a mock assault on the Baltic coast near Russia.
And it is not just in Eastern Europe and the Baltics where U.S. commandos are gearing up to counter Russia. Swedish and Norwegian special forces have passed along tips on having the right gear not just to survive in the increasingly contested Arctic region, but to operate effectively and improve tactics there as well, said Maj. Gen. Kirk Smith of the Air Force, an Afghan war veteran who is the commander of several thousand American Special Operations forces in Europe.
In their efforts, the United States and its allies must overcome one natural disadvantage: Authoritarian powers, like Russia, have an easier time with hybrid conflicts built on deceptions and falsehoods.
In the run-up to elections in Ukraine this year, U.S. officials said Russian-backed social media twice targeted U.S. Special Operations forces and conventional troops in disinformation efforts aimed at sowing distrust between the two countries.
An article March 5 by Novoros, a Russian-sponsored site, falsely claimed that the Ukrainian government had issued U.S. service members Ukrainian passports that would purportedly allow U.S. forces to infiltrate Russia. The article was shared over multiple Russian social media platforms, U.S. officials said.
The second instance was a mysterious widely distributed text that the Ukrainian border service, and presumably wide sections of the Ukrainian public, received March 25. These texts stated that U.S. Special Forces were going to start a "Maidan 3.0 protest" before the election, a reference to street protests five years ago that evolved into a revolution that deposed a widely despised, Russian-aligned leader. The texts also discouraged Ukrainians from military service.
Ukrainian authorities acted quickly to debunk the bogus information and urged the public to report messages that they found suspicious, U.S. officials said.
At a training range a few miles from the Hungarian headquarters, and at sites in Bulgaria and Romania, commandos practiced scenarios in which their high-tech equipment guided by satellite communications and precision strikes had been foiled by a Russian cyberattack.
"It's back to a compass and maps, and nothing else. It's old school," Sandor said. "We hope for the best and prepare for the worst."
Small teams of commandos from 10 countries rehearsed clandestine reconnaissance missions, sneaking up on potential targets and passing along information to local forces. Other predawn operations practiced slipping commandos in behind enemy lines or pulling them out without being detected. Commanders honed their ability to coordinate rapidly developing, simultaneous stealthy activities across several countries.
In a recent early morning training exercise, two dozen Hungarian commandos armed with M4 rifles and gas masks conducted a mock raid on an abandoned building where authorities suspected that notional Russian-backed Hungarian separatists were making a dirty bomb out of chlorine and other hazardous chemicals.
With a Cougar helicopter whomp-whomping overhead, the commandos stormed up two flights of stairs, seized the bomb-making materials and captured the terrorist leaders. On today's battlefield, the soldiers carried cellphones. And in a nod to the new dangers they face in this age of cybersecurity, instructions emblazoned on cellphone pouches tell their comrades: "If found dead, delete my browser history."
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