NATO's Riga Test 2021

 

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing”.

President Theodore Roosevelt

The Riga Test

October 20^th, 2021. The Riga Test concerns the good citizens of Latvia’s capital city and whether or not they can sleep in their beds safe in the knowledge that NATO is defending them.  The just finished Riga Conference 2021 was another milestone event, and I have had the honour of attending most of the Riga Conferences since 2006. I do so out of solidarity with my fellow Europeans and because Rigans live on the front-line of freedom. Riga is thus the perfect place to test the health and utility of the Alliance.  This year? I am worried. For the first time since 2006 a senior figure told me that some Latvians are becoming fearful for their future.  What I detected for the first time is that Latvians, ever conscious of history, can smell possible betrayal in the air, maybe not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow?

The key to moderating any successful panel is the quality of the people on it. At this year’s event I had the honour of chairing His Excellency, Ambassador Tomasz Szatkowski, the Permanent Representative of Poland to the North Atlantic Council, Baiba Braže, Assistant NATO Secretary-General for Public Diplomacy, and Dr Erik Brattberg of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.  The title of our session was, what is the Future of NATO under the new Strategic Concept? Good question.

Riga Conference 2021

As is my predilection I kicked off the panel with a characteristically lame joke.  I pointed out to the assembled great and good that I was a fan of Sheffield United Football Club.  ‘The Mighty Blades’, as United are known by me and my fellow delusionals, are a wonderfully cohesive team, but we are also rubbish.  NATO?  Right now, I am drafting a Shadow NATO Strategic Concept for The Alphen Group which I have the honour to chair.  The real NATO Strategic Concept, the where, why, how, when and with whom and what for the next decade, will probably be the most important such Alliance document since the very first in January 1950 which was afforded the glaringly obvious title, “The Strategic Plan for the Defence of North Atlantic Region (DC 6/1)”.

Frankly, if I had my way the 2022 document would be entitled “The Strategic Plan for the Future Security and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area’.  That will not happen for a whole host of politically irrelevant reasons, even if privately NATO officials are deeply concerned.  First, the thirty Allied nations no longer really agree about what is more important collective defence, crisis management, or co-operative security. Second, too many Allies continue to recognise only as much threat as they can afford.  Consequently, NATO faces an acute ends, ways and means crisis and there are simply not enough forces and resources, particularly European forces and resources.  They find it hard to undertake even today’s spectrum of missions around the 360 degrees of Alliance commitments that NATO has signed up to, let alone what’s coming next.  Third, NATO strategic concepts are fast becoming like a rich aunt’s Christmas tree, ever bigger, ever gaudier, and with ever more baubles hanging from it.  The 2022 Strategic Concept will have a whole box of baubles hanging from it that will have little or nothing to do with the strategic defence of the Euro-Atlantic area, such as climate change and women and security.  Don’t get me wrong, these are vitally important issues with which I sympathise, but they are not NATO’s core business.  If that statement offends the defence woke, then so be it.

The consequent danger is that Strategic Concept 2022 will be yet more NATO muddling through to some lowest common denominator of political convenience.  A smorgasbord of political euphemisms drafted to keep everyone happy (even President Macron) which says everything and thus nothing.  It is already happening. The word is that the most important goal of the Strategic Concept will be to maintain political cohesion at any price, even if ‘political cohesion’ is simply a metaphor for a rubbish NATO that can at best bluff deterrence and pretend defence, particularly on the Alliance’s eastern and northern flanks. 

The twin causes of Latvians' concerns is China-warped US military over-stretch and a growing crisis of deterrence and commitment in Western Europe, primarily, Britain, France and Germany.  The latter is caused mainly by a lack of solidarity with Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, and a profound lack of trust in each other.  The consequences might not be apparent in Western Europe, but they are in Latvia, and the other two Baltic States. At the very least, NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence will need to be significantly further enhanced with more forces, as well as significant investment in areas such as critical infrastructure protection and military mobility. 

The further west and south one goes across Europe the more one also hears the argument that Russia would never dare attack the NATO Baltic Allies. Really? How do they know if the Russians themselves don’t? All NATO can (and must) do is assess Russia’s political and economic stability, military capability, strategic opportunity, its stated intent and recent actions, none of which would put me at my ease if I were a citizen of Riga.  The very nature of Russia and its governance makes it vulnerable to sudden and potentially dangerous changes of political direction that could lead to a whole host of possible outcomes. These could range from a Gorbachev-like ‘new deal’ with the West to an ultra-nationalist military adventure towards the west, or just good old Russian political and economic collapse.

Riga and Risk

Given that reality the essential question Strategic Concept 2022 must answer is what will it take to both deter Russia and at the same time help stabilise NATO’s southern flank and deal with the threat of terrorism? First, NATO will need the necessary collective strategic ambition to meet both threats. NATO is a worst-case, high-end, defensive military alliance or it is nothing. NATO’s critical dilemma is that it is organised around the US and both Washington’s national security and military strategies are being warped by the military rise of China.  Put simply, the US can no longer be strong all of the time everywhere. Consequently, NATO’s worst-case reality over the next decade would be a US forced to confront simultaneous engineered major crises from the Indo-Pacific to the Arctic, whilst an under-armed Europe meanders along in the ‘peaceful’ fantasy of the Euro-world with militarily Lilliputian Europeans arguing endlessly over this bit of EU competence or that.  The irrelevant in pursuit of the meaningless at the expense of the over-committed. 

Second, NATO will need the right amount of the right military force and civilian capability across a new spectrum of hybrid, cyber and high-end hyper war to maintain even a minimally credible deterrence posture. At a conference of senior NATO representatives and officials I suggested the next ten years of military adaptation could see the equivalent of the previous seventy years of military technological transformation given the changing nature and character of war. A step change is already apparent in the technology of war that could drastically shorten the time between decision to act and military objective, much of it driven by emerging and disruptive technologies (EDT) such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic glide systems and drone swarms that will transform NATO’s defence space.  

I really don’t like saying “I told you so” (well, in fact, I do), but with each passing day the dark vision at the start of my latest brilliant and very reasonably-priced Oxford book, Future War and the Defence of Europe, is being proven correct. In August, the Chinese launched a global reach Long March hybrid ballistic missile and hypersonic nuclear-capable manoeuvrable ‘glide’ system.  The recent large Russian ZAPAD 21 military exercise on Latvia’s doorstep not only tested a host of robotic systems but also left an ominously large ‘military footprint’ in Moscow’s client state, Belarus. Add to the mix Nordstream 2 and Germany’s growing reliance on Putin for its energy Russia is steadily and cleverly deploying the means to coerce and, if needs be threaten, much of Europe into compliance.

Riga Test 2021

One test of Strategic Concept 2022 for me, and thus NATO’s responsibility to the well-being of the people of Riga will be a commitment by Canadian and European allies to create by 2030 (at the very latest) an Allied Command Operations Heavy Mobile European Force (AMHF). The AMHF would dramatically reinforce NATO's Forward Presence and anywhere around NATO’s flanks with a heavy, fast moving force.  The AMHF might be further strengthened by moving HQ ARRC from sleepy Gloucestershire to somewhere in the 1500km gap between Multinational Corps Northeast on the Polish-German border and Latvia’s border with Russia. The AMHF would also need to be the outcome of real European strategic ambition, a high-end, first responder allied Future Force able to act from sea-bed to space and across the multi-domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge.  The AMHF would also be the heartbeat of the NATO Military Strategy sufficiently robust and responsive, and held at a sufficient level of readiness, to meet all and any threats to the territory of the Euro-Atlantic Area in the first instance.   

The AMHF would afford NATO a real trip-wire deterrent posture by moving far beyond the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) and the enhanced NATO Response Force (eNRF). It would also act as a ‘synergizer’ enabling the Alliance to not only exploit emerging and disruptive technologies, but critically maintain a high degree of interoperability with fast evolving US forces, a key component of credible deterrence. Finally, the AMHF would be central to Allied efforts to introduce artificial intelligence, super/quantum computing, big data, machine-learning, drone swarming, hypersonic weapon systems into the NATO Order of Battle and thus embed the Alliance’s deterrence and defence posture in hyper-fast warfare which will be critical to the credibility of the future NATO.  

Rigour, Riga and Russia

The real test of Strategic Concept 2022 will be whether or not it reinforces deterrence in the Baltic States to such an extent that Russia would not even think about invading under any circumstances.  NATO was founded to be a ‘don’t even think about it’ alliance.  The problem is that invading the Baltic States is precisely what President Putin and General Gerasimov are thinking about.  That does not mean any such invasion is going to happen tomorrow, nor does it mean Russian forces would go beyond Lithuania into Poland, but Moscow is certainly keeping such an attack open as both an option, as well as a lever ,to coerce increasingly uncertain Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  Tant pis? Well no. If the Baltic States were lost it is hard to believe the likes of Germany would be willing to mount a rescue mission and in that case NATO would be finished.  NATO’s core, core business is thus not really defence at all, but rather deterrence. In short, such a defeat would mean the end of NATO as a credible alliance and President Putin would like nothing more to be his legacy.  Therefore, Strategic Concept 2022 must not be yet another exercise in floppy political short-termism at the expense of rigorous longer-term strategic realism. 

Years ago at a big NATO bash I upset one secretary-general by publicly disagreeing with him about the purpose of strategic concepts.  He suggested that the main purpose was to reach out to publics, particularly young people.  No, I demurred, the clue is in the name. The purpose of a strategic concept is to re-establish and re-confirm the essential contract between political leaders, who set NATO’s strategic direction of travel, and those Alliance officials charged with carrying out their instructions.  Unfortunately, ever since NATO strategic concepts became part of the public domain they have lost their essential strategic rigour and are more like party political manifestos than over-arching political strategy for a military-strategic alliance. Comparing the 1950 Strategic Concept with its 2010 descendant is like comparing Tolstoy’s War and Peace to Disney’s Frozen II. 

Strategic Concept 2022 must champion the return of Alliance rigour because strategy drives policy and planning. Rigour will be vital if Riga is to be truly secure in the face of a restless Russia.  NATO is at a critical strategic inflection point and my message to NATO leaders responsible for the Strategic Concept and the future peace of Europe is necessarily blunt. Only NATO can generate the necessary power to guarantee Europe’s peace, but for NATO to do the job all the citizens of its democracies ask of it there can be no more political blah blah dressed up as sound strategy.  You, NATO leaders, will betray the people of Riga, my fellow free Europeans, if at the 2022 Madrid Summit you again put your short term politics before their long-term freedom. Now, more than ever, NATO needs a Strategic Plan for the Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area if it is to eventually pass Riga Test 2030, the real purpose of NATO Strategic Concept 2022. Don’t screw up! 

Julian Lindley-French

Macron, Power and Autonomy

 After Brexit, 80% of NATO’s defence expenditure will come from non-EU Allies”.

Secretary-General Stoltenberg, November 2019

Macron and autonomy

October 13^th, 2021. President Macron is right. ‘Europe’ needs to become a much more serious strategic power, but how Europe becomes more serious could well decide if Europe has any power.

In the past week three events have demonstrated the extent to which Europe is vulnerable to events elsewhere. First, President Putin has been fiddling with Europe’s gas supplies in an effort to coerce the European Commission and EU Member-States into sanctioning the German-Russian Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. If it goes active, as it will, Europe will become even more dependent on Russian energy, Moscow will have (further) extended its sphere of influence at the throwing of a switch, and much of Central and Eastern Europe will be forced into a choice between “war and warmth”, as one British minister put it.  German leadership or German selfishness? Second, President Xi Jingping has again been threatening to reunite Taiwan with the rest of China by force.  China is not ready quite yet to invade Taiwan, but Beijing’s growing military capability will not only render such a threat increasingly plausible, it will also focus much of America’s future strategic attention on the Indo-Pacific with profound implications for both Europe and NATO. Third, Nicholas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s chief software officer, resigned saying that the US had already lost the cyber-security war with China and will soon lose the race to develop military artificial intelligence, the very stuff of future war and my latest brilliant and very reasonably-priced Oxford book Future War and the Defence of Europe.

President Macron’s call for greater European strategic autonomy was both defence focussed and couched in the language of Macro-Gaullism. In a recent speech he claimed that, “This [European strategic autonomy] is not an alternative to the United States alliance. It is not a substitute, but it is to take responsibility for the European pillar within NATO and draw the conclusions that we are asked to take care of our protection”.  If that was the extent of Macron’s ambitions there would be no argument.  However, he then went on to say that, “…Europeans must stop being naïve. When we are under pressure from powers, which at times harden [their stance], we need to react and show that we have the power and capacity to defend ourselves”.  Naïve about whom?  With the AUKUS ruckus still in full flow Macron was in fact implying that the US is no longer a reliable ally and, that its perfidious ‘mini me’ Britain is little more than an American vassal state (his Europe Minister even said that).

(Small) Groundhog Day?

During France’s forthcoming presidency of the EU Paris will seek to define strategic autonomy specifically as European Union strategic autonomy with the EU the future European pillar of a transformed NATO.  France will champion the idea of a 5,000 strong European initial entry force, which for those of us who worked on the 60,000 strong European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) twenty years ago feels more like Groundhog Day than D-Day, albeit a small groundhog. The idea that in 2021 the ‘IEF’ is all the EU could muster for high-end crisis intervention highlights Europe’s essential weakness, the gap between ambition and practice. The retreat from strategic ambition evident over the past twenty years begs two fundamental questions; where exactly is the necessary fighting power and all of its enablers going to come from, and who is going to pay for it in the post-COVID European economy?  France? 

As French bank BNP has stated, “In the draft 2021 budget, the French government forecasts budget deficits of 10.2% of GDP in 2020 followed by 6.7% in 2021. The public debt ratio is expected to rise by 20 points, to 117.5%, in 2020, before declining slightly, to 116.2%, in 2021…the emergency measures…have effectively cushioned the economic shock caused by lockdown; the debate is about the extent and speed of the positive effects to be expected from the recovery plan”. Europe’s simple reality is NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s reality, 80% of NATO’s defence expenditure is now made by non-EU allies, with an equally indebted UK alone representing close to 25% of all European defence expenditure. 

Macron’s vision would make sense if there was agreement across the EU to move towards a European Defence Union with a common budget, but there is not. Countries that could make a very significant contribution to EU strategic autonomy, such as Poland, do not want it. Germany only talks European Defence Union to escape Berlin’s interminable defence dilemma over how much German military power is good European power. Even France, which constantly calls for more European defence integration, only wants it on French terms, and so long as France retains the capacity to be strategically autonomous from a future strategically autonomous EU. In other words, it is hard to see how European strategic autonomy that is ‘European’, ‘strategic’ and ‘autonomous’ could ever be realised without the active support of the US and the active participation of the British, the very ‘untrustworthy’ nations Macron implies are the reason why ‘Europe’ needs autonomy.

Power is as power does

The American economist J.K. Galbraith once famously said that, “power is as power does”.  Strategic autonomy from the US would by definition require Europeans to have sufficient military power to be autonomous from the US. In other words, the measure for such ‘strategic’ autonomy would be European military power in relation to US military power.  Therefore, if Europeans really want the EU to be strategically autonomous from the US and the future European pillar of a transformed NATO, then the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy would need to be imbued with far, far more strategic ambition than has ever been the case.  Indeed, CSDP only exists because of NATO.

To underline that point Ambassador (Ret.) Alexander Vershbow, the former Deputy Secretary-General of NATO, and Dr Hans Binnendijk, a hugely-respected Washington defence analyst, have just published an excellent article in Defense News which effectively sets the bar for such ambition. In, Needed: A transatlantic agreement on European strategic autonomy Vershbow and Binnendijk suggest that, “One way to establish a military standard for strategic autonomy is to agree that Europe will provide one-half of NATO’s current agreed ‘level of ambition.’ That would translate into Europe being able to conduct three nearly simultaneous small operations and one major operation on its own. Given Europe’s current lack of enablers, its relatively low readiness rates, and its fragmented military industrial complex, meeting this standard will take time. So strategic autonomy will be a process, not a diplomatic declaration. But the process should start now”.  You bet!

 Autonomy, force and technology

Vershbow and Binnendijk also believe that European strategic autonomy could only ever be realised within the framework of NATO, enabled by the Americans and including the British. What would such autonomy look like in practice?  At its core there would be sufficient and contemporary European military fighting power and enablers to create a real European rapid reaction future force that could both act as a high-end first responder to deter Russia in an emergency and project stability to Europe’s south.  Such a force will be vital if Europeans are to fulfil their obligations under what is a new transatlantic security contract in which Europeans help keep America strong where she needs to be strong, in return for a continuing American security guarantee to Europe.

To that end, Macron is certainly right to highlight the need to radically re-structure the European Defence and Technological Industrial Base (EDTIB) and Europeans must develop the technology of future war, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, and hypersonic systems and drone swarms etc and et al.  Part of Macron’s narrative is clearly designed to protect the French defence industry, much like from London’s perspective AUKUS is designed to help shore up the British defence industry.  Macron also understands that such so-called emerging and disruptive technologies (EDT) will not only be vital for Europe’s future defence, but that such ‘EDTs’ could also offset much of Europe’s military weakness by easing Europe’s chronic lack of military expeditionary capability through technology-driven enablers. 

The paradox is that no amount of reform of the EDTIB is likely to realise Macron’s vision without significant buy-in from the US and its defence technological industrial base and any such future force would need to be part of NATO rather than the EU.  Any attempts by the EU to bypass the US by looking to China and Russia to give Europeans such a technological step up, as Macron seems at times to imply, would simply be self-defeating. That said, it is vital that Europeans confront the reality of the mass disruptive and mass destructive information war, cyber war and hyper-fast future war that is headed their way and the artificially-intelligent, machine-led battlespace of the future that according to Chaillan an ethically-unburdened China is pioneering.

NATO, autonomy and responsibility

The 2022 NATO Strategic Concept should ideally drive the much needed transformation of the Alliance, but that will only happen if NATO is more politically cohesive and the burdens of Europe’s future defence shared more equitably across the Euro-Atlantic area.  A transformed Alliance would be a more global NATO that can help meet the challenge of China, pivotal for strengthened deterrence and defence against Russia, has a strong role in combatting international terrorism with a renewed focus on Europe’s South, and at the hub of a more global partnership network with a much more ambitious strategic partnership with the EU.  NATO must also take the lead in developing strong NATO capabilities to meet the threat posed by ethics-free hyperwar and the potential use of it by China and Russia.

And yet, in an interview in the New York Times this week the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire signalled something very different. He suggested that the key challenge was for the EU to become independent from the United States so that it is able to defend its [French?] own interests, whether economic or strategic. First, defend with what?  Second, in the same interview Le Maire implied equivalency in the French elite mind between the democratic US and autocratic China. Unfortunately, for all Macron’s protestations of love for NATO his vision of strategic autonomy is ultimately an EU defence that is not just autonomous from the US, but independent.  Macron’s justification is that AUKUS has revealed both the US and Britain to be unreliable allies. Unreliable for whom?  In any case, the need for greater European strategic autonomy has nothing to do with the reliability or otherwise of either the Americans or the British and there are enough graves across continental Europe of young Americans and Britons to find Macron’s inference of unreliability plainly insulting.  Rather, European strategic autonomy is needed but to help transform NATO, not to replace it.

Therefore, European strategic autonomy will only ever work if it is a metaphor for greater European strategic responsibility and the only chance of that happening is if it is also done with the Americans and inside NATO. Yes, the EU would be a beneficiary of such power, but not its driver.  Given its structure and culture all the EU is ever likely to do is potter around the country lanes and byways of real power trying to find its way through the fog of its own contradictions with a strategic compass that like some demented satnav offers Europeans a whole host of attractive destinations, but absolutely no idea how to get to any of them.  The EU certainly has a role to play helping to make its Member-States more resilient, but that part of Brussels will never be a driver of the twenty-first century super-highway of hyper military power which ‘strategic’ autonomy implies. 

Folie de grandeur?

Once the AUKUS ruckus has died down (as it will) and the French presidential elections are over one can only hope that France, the US and UK reset their strategic relationship.  Don’t hold your breath. It is not a given that Macro-Gaullism is simply a ruse to attract domestic support in the run-up to the French presidential elections.  President Macron really does seem to believe his own hype.  In such circumstances, it can only be further hoped that a new Berlin government also heralds a return to German statecraft that used to be so good at preventing European problems becoming transatlantic crises.  This is because the ultimate paradox of ‘l’autonomie strategique a la Macron’ is that far from heralding the age of a strategic Europe it could well destroy it, and do NATO an awful lot of damage in the process.  

Power is power precisely because power does. It is European weakness that has rendered Europeans dependent and it is vital that European democracies become more powerful if they are also to be responsible and take their proper place alongside the world’s other democracies in maintaining the twenty-first century peace. Some Americans suggest that how Europeans become more effective allies really does not matter.  They should be careful what they wish for. Thankfully, the chance of Macron’s strategically independent Europe being realised is about as likely as Boris Johnson being invited to join l’Academie Francaise (“Donnez-moi un break”?).  

There are also a host of European states that have no interest in French ambitions to decouple Europe from America and subordinate Britain.  Rather, the more likely outcome if Macron persists is that France will simply isolate itself from powerful allies.  So, yes, Macron is right to call for Europe to become a serious strategic actor, and with more power Europeans will also develop more autonomy.  However, if European strategic autonomy is at the expense of the future NATO Europe will be neither serious nor strategic. Folie de grandeur?   

Julian Lindley-French