And it's the Iron Chancellor, as usual.

Basically, the Polish prime minister asked for 10,000 NATO boots to be put permanently on the ground way back in March. Last week, however, Angela Merkel put down the idea of permanent military placements in Eastern Europe while she was in Latvia.

There are hopes that a new action plan, to be revealed at the summit in Wales. Some hawks, however, feel it nothing more than a feat of mental gymnastics that Camnator would be proud of. The problem arises form the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which forbid the establishment of permanent troop deployments, although Russia hasn't been exactly holding up her part of the bargain. Merkel, predictably, thinks we should abide by the treaty.

One "senior NATO official" also ruled out permanent deployments, and instead made reference to "appropriate presence", which is a deliberately open-ended use of language. The recent creation of an expeditionary force/"high readiness brigade", led by British officers and capable of being launched in "hours", will be stationed mainly in Poland and have its HQ on the Baltic coast.

There are a number of other placements in Eastern Europe, including the U.S.'s EAS in Germany, British paratroopers in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Danish, French and British fighter jets in Poland and Estonia.

This might sound substantial, but the biggest NATO Baltic war-game consisted of 6,000 troops. Russia's war-games around the Baltic and Ukrainian borders have involved 150,000.

That's a whole lot of troops for war games