NATO, Military Mobility and the Dark Defence Web

 NATO, Military Mobility and the Dark Defence Web

By

Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French

D-Day, June 6, 2021

   “We have to be ready for the hardest game”.

Admiral Robert Burke USN, Commander, Allied Joint Force Command, Naples

NATO Exercise Steadfast Defender 2021

The only true test of a major military exercise is if it properly prepares those engaged for a dangerous reality they may one day have to face.  Too often, such exercises are like Hollywood disaster movies.  When all seems lost there is suddenly a miraculous event.  The reality is that people and institutions only really learn from failure.  That is the essential message of two major pieces of work that we have just published.  Co-written with Gen (Ret.) John R. Allen our new book Future War and the Defence of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/future-war-and-the-defence-of-europe-9780198855835?cc=nl&lang=en& examines how Europe can be defended in a battlespace being transformed by new technologies.  Co-written with Lieutenant-General Heinrich Brauss a major report entitled Military Mobility: Moving Mountains for Europe’s Defence (Washington: CEPA) https://cepa.org/the-cepa-military-mobility-project-moving-mountains-for-europes-defense/  examines how forces and resources could be better moved to bolster both deterrence and defence.

NATO Exercise Steadfast Defender 2021 is designed to test Alliance collective defence against the backdrop of an Article 5 contingency. Involving over 9000 troops from 20 nations, 18 ships, a submarines and some 50 aircraft the exercise not only stretches across the entirety of the Euro-Atlantic Area from North America to Romania it also spans the spectrum of hybrid war, cyber war and what is fast becoming the future of warfare, ultra-fast hyperwar. At its conceptual core is the urgent need to improve the interoperability and survivability of Allied forces in the most testing of environments, as well as their readiness.  NATO Exercise Steadfast Defender 2021 is also testing many of the assumptions that both the book and the report challenge. Steadfast Defender began on May 12^th and will continue until June 22^nd. 

NATO and the Dark Defence Web

General Sir Patrick Sanders, Commander of Britain’s Strategic Command has highlighted the urgent need for more ‘cyber warriors’.  As part of Steadfast Defender Britain’s new Carrier Strike Group under the command of HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of Britain’s two new 70,000 ton heavy aircraft carriers, will turn off all electronic systems, including mobile phones to simulate the loss of satellites, to counter cyber-attacks. However, such measures are hardly the advanced counter-measures and force protection allied forces will need.  Future War and the Defence of Europe opens with a scenario in which on the brink of a major emergency a deployed NATO maritime task force also under the command of HMS Queen Elizabeth suffers just such an attack. This leads to a host of critical poorly protected command systems crashing leaving the task force effectively defenceless.  Moments later two Russian hypersonic anti-ship missiles crash into Big Lizzie sending her and her crew of 1500 to the sea bed. 

In any future war such a deployed NATO force will need both defensive and offensive cyber capabilities as part a deep, integrated defence.  This is because China and Russia are daily engaged on the emerging dark defence web to identify defence vulnerabilities and ruthlessly exploit them.  Credible future defence will rest on a host of interactions between societal resilience, increasingly ‘robotic’ conventional military forces, cyber capabilities and the nuclear deterrent.  Given the entry of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and soon-to-be quantum computing in the command chain it is vital the system is future proofed against such emerging and disruptive attacks.

Military mobility and the Black Sea

Endex will take place with a simulated attack by Russia on Romania.  Some of the planning seems to presume the entry of a large NATO maritime-amphibious force into the Black Sea.  However, permission for Allied ships to transit the Dardanelles will depend on Turkey which is not only an important NATO ally, but a pivotal player in the entire Black Sea Region but far beyond. In 1915, Britain and France found to their great cost what happens when they tried and failed to force the Dardanelles. Moreover, as the recent crisis on Ukraine’s borders attests Russia has placed a lot of military capabilities in its southern military district, including advanced anti-air and anti-ship capabilities.

Credible Allied defence of Romania and much of the Black Sea Region will depend on the ability to move forces and resources quickly across infrastructures that as yet do not exist.  This is a weakness that one of the co-authors of this piece rather painfully discovered as Commander of US Army, Europe.  Nor is the challenge merely one posed by out-dated or incapable infrastructure.  The CEPA report on military mobility in Europe is clear: “Romania is in need of major improvements to its air, road, river and rail infrastructure. Romania’s road infrastructure is not at all suitable at present for large deployments of forces due to narrow roads, weak bridges that would be unable to support large and heavy vehicles, and narrow tunnels.  There are also several river crossings in Romania where bridges cannot support armour (the Focșani and Galați bridges being the exception). Romania does have airfields which could be used by large aircraft to transport a spearhead force, such as the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF).  The Danube River is a major thoroughfare, but needs more ports of entry to be constructed and infrastructure improved along the length of the river from Germany to the Black Sea. If the River Danube is to be exploited as a corridor for mobility ferries on the Danube could provide a logistical reserve capability and should be developed by both Romania and Bulgaria. The Romanian rail system would be unable to transport a huge tonnage of equipment via rail, but could transport some military equipment at a relatively high speed”.

NATO’s Future Integrated Defence

NATO will soon embark on the drafting of a new Strategic Concept – the what, why where, when, how and with what of the Alliance. At its heart there will need to be a truly integrated defence across the broad spectrum from sensors to shooters.  To be credible such a system will need to be digital resilient and able to identify and respond to a host of attacks. Emerging and disruptive technologies are fast changing both the character and nature of warfare across the multi-domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space information and knowledge in which all vulnerabilities are ruthlessly exposed and attacked.  ‘Defence’ itself will need to counter disinformation, deception, destabilisation, systemic disruption and coercion through implied or actual destruction. 

Future War and the Defence of Europe ends with a second 2029 scenario is which a deployed NATO task force is attacked but has been armed, equipped and worked-up to be able not just to respond but counter any such threat.  The attack takes place against the backdrop of a Europe replete with sufficiently robust civilian and military systems, structures and infrastructures to deny an enemy the spoils of illegal war at anything like an acceptable cost because of decisions taken now and which were enshrined in the December 2021 Strategic Concept.  

Therefore, the true test of exercises like Steadfast Defender 2021 will be whether or not the Alliance is really prepared for the kind of warfare it will soon face.  In that light, Steadfast Defender is a good start, but only a start of what must necessarily be not just the adaptation of Alliance defence and deterrence by 2030 at the very latest, but its wholesale transformation.  In other words, NATO must be hard enough to engage in what is already a hard game that will become ever harder.

Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French