In his column this week, Mike Edwards writes while deployed as an Army Reservist on a massive NATO training mission.

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There’s not too much wi-fi in my foxhole here in a forest on a massive military training area in Poland and anyway, mobile phones and laptops are strictly forbidden.

A German military officer had a mobile phone call hacked by Russia while in Singapore earlier this year and the result of that imbroglio is that I am writing this despatch from NATO’s front line on fag packets and the back of old bookies’ slips with a stub of pencil from behind an ear.

If you are reading this, then I will have been successful in finding a callbox in a nearby village, to hammer Zloty coins into by the handful and phone the newsdesk to file my copy.

Helensburgh is a military town and there will be many in the G84 postcode who will have lain in these same emplacements down the years, as Blueland goes to guns against Redland again.

Only this time the stakes are immeasurably higher than they were even five years ago. A few miles away to my east lies the border between Poland and Ukraine and across that border is a country at war.

I am privileged to be a minute cog in a massive military machine as NATO mounts its biggest exercise in modern times.

It is 40 years since anything on this scale was previously attempted. In total 16,000 British troops have been deployed in a serious of manoeuvres across Europe, from the Aegean to the Arctic.

In all my time in the Army Reserve, the only deployments I have seen which were bigger, were operations I was mobilised for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Britain has sent tanks to Poland by train. London has staged thousands of troops here through German barracks unused by this army since the coldest days of the Cold War.

The new world order is unfolding among the deer, badgers, dragonflies and foxes of this beautiful landscape, where the hot sun quickly burns away the morning mist and dries the dew on what may yet be a battlefield rather than real estate for exercise.

The NATO message is that this training is all about team-building and ensuring that member nations work together with common purpose.

There is no mention of Ukraine and certainly no mention of Russia, who are having it out next door. But you don’t need to be a Montgomery to understand the ground truth.

The exercise is fictional and the enemy is notional. Just a few miles away in Ukraine the narrative is beyond the worst febrile, Machiavellian nightmares of any scenario writers and the enemy is all too real.

How much military spending will be needed?

Poland is a beautiful country and one which I would very much like to explore in more detail some time, its famous cities in particular. Parts of it are very like Scotland with pine forests and ploughed fields.

Our reason for being here though is not agrarian, rather keeping a weather eye on the east and to be more frank, the east of Ukraine.

The so-called Russian special military operation there is now more than two years-old and the eyes of the world are on how much further west it might move.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak used a visit to the Polish capital Warsaw last month to announce more military aid to Ukraine and a significant increase in defence spending at home, both moves designed to give Vladimir Putin pause for thought.

But in my view, we should also be looking to the west to see what the man most likely to occupy the White House in the new year is saying. Donald Trump is uncomfortably close to Putin for my liking and has already threatened to pull the vast US military out of NATO if nations don’t pay more of their way to the alliance, a dangerous and disastrous event were it to happen.

Sunak has pledged to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP per annum meaning we will spend £87 billion a year by 2030.

But as this exercise moves away from central to northern Europe, I find myself asking if this will be enough to keep Putin out and Trump in.

As father, as son

From Poland to Norway via Germany and London, I am once again in the centre of the biggest NATO exercise since the last time Russia was a potential enemy. I have yet to draw breath, far less get a dhobi done.

It is refreshing yet poignant, to be on exercise in the beautiful town of Stavanger where my father’s Royal Navy destroyer came at the end of World War Two, 80 years ago almost to the day. He seldom spoke of his war, certainly not his time in the Atlantic being hunted down by U-boat wolf packs.

Instead, he would talk of coming alongside here and seeing German helmets and weapons from the recently-surrendered occupiers and incongruously, mounds of human hair, piled on the dockside.

The provenance of the militaria was obvious, the hair less so. But then he saw the lorries driving through the town, carrying dozens of shaven-headed women who were being pilloried by locals, a punishment for having German sailors as boyfriends.

As I wander around the harbour, wondering if he’d looked at the same quaint waterfront buildings, I realise how significant a place this is for me to visit.

It may well be my final foreign deployment as a soldier but moreover it is to the place which was also my father’s last deployment in Europe.

From here I return to the Gareside banlieue for a rest. He left Norway for Gibraltar, Suez, Aden, South Africa and Ceylon en route to the Pacific where he and his comrades prepared to invade Japan.

Dropping the atomic bomb shortly after his fleet got to Australia ended the war, and he always said, saved his life. Which of course meant that it saved mine too.