By
“A
transition from sequential and concentrated actions to continuous and
distributed ones, conducted simultaneously in all spheres of confrontation, and
also in distant theatres of military operations is occurring.”
General
Valeriy Gerasimov
The War to
the East
In their very
legalistic way the decision by the German energy regulator to suspend the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline may just be
the first real evidence that Berlin is finally thinking strategically. If so it
is not a moment too soon. Europeans
urgently need to re-consider any policy that deepens Europe’s energy dependence
on Russia, even if that means missing carbon emission targets. It would be strategic
illiteracy of the worst kind to put the freedom of Europeans at risk simply to
meet arbitrary climate change targets, important tough they are.
President Putin
will always use the power he is given by Europe against Europe. The grand
strategic aim of the Kremlin is to force much of Eastern Europe, including the
Baltic States into a new Russian sphere of influence. That is why thousands of
desperate migrants are being used as human pawns and forced towards the Belarus
border with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, Belarus threatens to disrupt gas
supplies to much of Eastern Europe, Russian nuclear bombers fly down the North
Sea into the English Channel, and a Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) test scatters
debris in the path of the International Space Station (ISS) whilst some 90,000
troops of Russia’s most capable military units gather on Ukraine’s eastern and
northern borders. It is the Gerasimov Doctrine in action by which Moscow
simultaneously applies ‘strategic maskirovka’ (deception) and ‘desinformatsiya’
(disinformation) together with so-called ‘active measures’ to keep a deeply
disjointed and feeble Europe politically and militarily off-balance. The
immediate aim is to prevent Ukraine crossing a Russian ‘red line’ by moving
formally to join NATO. That was the purpose of President Putin’s September 2021
essay in which he denied Ukraine had ever been an independent state and was
thus an integral part of Russia. Therefore, even though President Biden
recently told President Zelensky that NATO membership is a long way off
Ukraine’s eventual integration into free Europe must now be a shared Allied
strategic aim.
The use of Maskirovka and desinformatsiya
is war that is short of war in the grey zone between war and peace. Former NATO
Supreme Allied Commander, General Phil Breedlove, says that Moscow already sees
itself at war with the West and that its chosen weapon is disinformation. It is
a purposeful 5D warfare strategy that combines implied destruction with
disinformation, destabilisation, disruption and deception and which is driven
from the very top of the Russian state through multiple messaging and by
ramping up the threat of force.
Appeasing Putin
With winter
coming and Europe in some disarray Putin may think he will never have a better
opportunity to exploit a sixth 'D', energy dependence. Indeed, a hitherto
craven Brussels has appeared terrified that Russia, and its puppet Belarus,
will cut gas supplies to much of Europe.
Moscow’s clumsy efforts of late to coerce the European Commission into
approving Nordstream 2 by hiking gas
prices on the spot market demonstrated exactly why Russia will never be a
reliable or trusted energy partner. Had
Germany led Europe to even greater reliance on Russian gas (it might still do) it
would have tied not just Berlin to Moscow in so many ways, but much of the rest
of Europe. One could almost hear the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
The ‘response’
from Brussels thus far has made a mockery of the empty rhetoric of EU
sovereignty. Indeed, the EU’s response thus far has been little short of
appeasement even though Horst Seehofer, the German Minister of the Interior,
last week said that the Kremlin was the architect of the current tensions. If
the EU cannot summon the diplomatic and economic power to pressure the Kremlin
to stop Belarus from turning desperate migrants into pawns, there is little hope
Russia can be dissuaded by Europeans from pursuing its grander ambitions.
Instead of
focussing on the minnow Lukashenko and Russia’s Belarus colony, the EU should
be directing its ire towards Moscow. Rather, the EU prefers to criticize the
Poles for how they are dealing with a desperate situation, just as Brussels
recently criticised Kiev for using drones to retaliate against Russia’s use of
artillery that killed Ukrainian soldiers. The threat of EU sanctions, including
on airlines flying migrants to Minsk is welcome, but in some respects it helps
the Russian cause by creating yet more tension with Turkey. There is also the
potential for a dangerous and rapid escalation of tensions, particularly if
Belarussian border guards trigger an armed confrontation close to the
strategically-vital Suwalki Corridor, which not only links the EU and NATO to
the Baltic States, but Russia with its armed enclave Kaliningrad. It is all too
easy to see Russia moving to resolve a “humanitarian crisis” in or near
Kaliningrad by engineering such a confrontation. Russian and Belarussian
Special Forces have been observed carrying out reconnaissance missions to time
the responses of Latvian security forces to attempted incursions by migrants.
Such actions have not gone unnoticed in Kiev. One only has to look at a map to
see how relatively easy it would be for Russian forces to the north in Belarus
and the east to attack the Ukrainian capital. It is almost as though Russia’s
recent Zapad 21 military exercise never ended and Russia is undertaking a dress
rehearsal for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine…or not.
Chess or Poker?
Will President
Putin invade Ukraine? Naturally, Moscow denies it has any intention to attack Ukraine,
but then the Gerasimov Doctrine might mean Russia does not have to. The threat
of force might well be enough to coerce a Ukraine that is profoundly uncertain
about the real strength of support from its European ‘partners’. However, Putin
has been building up Russia's military capacity around Ukraine's eastern and northern
borders for many months. Russia now has almost all the military pieces in place
so that should Putin decide to act he could.
What better way for President Putin to subjugate Ukraine, humiliate the
EU, divide NATO, and thus assure his legacy as a ‘great’ Russian who ‘saved’
Ukraine from 'Western incursions'?
It is also entirely
in President Putin’s gift to end the tensions now if he so wished. There is
still little chance he will. President Putin sees himself as a grand master of
grand strategic chess when in fact his real game is stud poker. The tragedy for the people of Eastern Europe
is that Russia’s apparent strength is primarily due to Western European
weakness and incompetence which has turned the reality of Russian weakness into
an illusion of strength. The Nordstream 2
decision may just be the first sign that Europe is prepared to raise the
stakes.
Power and
Strategy
Even if Moscow
does takes its foot off Kiev’s throat for the moment it is unlikely to mark a
new dawn in either Russia-Ukraine or Russia-West relations. The current crisis
is a clash of wills. Putin is calling Europe's bluff and seeking to demonstrate
an Atlantic Alliance divided. Have Europe’s political leaders the collective
courage and will to counter Russia? Europe’s growing energy dependence on
Russia is leading Moscow to believe it now has Europeans just where it wants
them and the 'weapon' to potentially decouple the US from its European Allies.
Not surprisingly, the US Administration is deeply concerned and both Secretary
of State Tony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin have made plain
those concerns.
Deterring Russia
from its strategic direction of travel will require Europeans and their North
American allies to collectively apply counter-pressure. That will only be
possible if the Allies adopt their own active measures in the form of a counter
5D warfare strategy with the main effort centred on NATO. In short, the Kremlin
needs to be made to understand it will pay a heavy price if it continues with
such aggression. Right now, that means facing down Russia, politically,
economically and militarily. Over the medium term such deterrence will require
effective counter-messaging, information operations, offensive cyber
operations, a new Allied balance between military power projection and
people/information protection, resiliency, robustness and redundancy in
defence, and an EU-NATO strategic partnership that can generate a range of
incentives and constraints on Russian policy.
Russia will only
be stopped when it is stopped and the Nordstream
2 decision might, just might, suggest European leaders now recognise
that. If not, then what is happening
today will just be the beginning of repeated Moscow-generated confrontations that
will demand of European leaders both the political will and the means to deter
Russia, something that for too long they have been reluctant to do. To do that
they will all need to grow up strategically and stop rendering Europe and
Europeans so systemically vulnerable to Russian energy. The American economist
J.K. Galbraith once famously said that power is as power does. President Putin
needs to understand that power, like gas, can flow two ways. Nordstream 2? Scrap it!
Ben Hodges and Julian
Lindley-French
Lieut. General (Ret.) Ben Hodges
is Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy
Analysis in Washington. Professor Julian Lindley-French is Chairman of The
Alphen Group
“We could hardly dream of building a kind of Great Wall of France, which would in any case be far too costly. Instead we have foreseen powerful but flexible means of organising defence, based on the dual principle of taking full advantage of the terrain and establishing a continuous line of fire everywhere”.
Andre Maginot, 1929
NATO’s deterrence hole
November 2nd, 2021. Sometimes history, theory,
drama and reality combine. As I write,
Russia’s elite 1st Guards Tank Army and the 41st Combined Arms Army
are moving and massing, again causing concern in Kiev and at NATO HQ. Last
week, I delivered the Band of Brothers speech
from Shakespeare’s Henry V during the
St Crispin’s Night dinner at the Cavalry and Guards Club in London. On Thursday, I took part in Allied Command
Transformation’s Concept Development and
Experimentation Conference and considered Future War and the Defence of Europe (funny that!). Is NATO a latter day Maginot Line? No.
However, the Alliance urgently needs to close the gap between the theory
of deterrence and the reality if it is not to become like the August 1939 Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the
United Kingdom and Poland. It might
have been mutual but it was not of much assistance to Poland. Empty deterrence?
Deterrence is always a trade-off between history, politics,
technology and money but sometimes such trade-offs create a deterrence hole
because they convince democratic leaders they are more secure than they are. Take Andre Maginot. He was the French Minister
of War who gave his name to France’s ill-fated anti-German Maginot Line. His vision of a “powerful but flexible means
of organising defence, based on the dual principle of taking full advantage of
the terrain and establishing a continuous line of fire everywhere” was delusional. Indeed, the Maginot Line was a
military-strategic folly, an illusion of power that gave a sense of false
security to those who it was meant to protect.
It was also quickly overtaken by technology and the changing character
of warfare. It was also an extremely
expensive illusion of safety that between 1930 and 1939 cost some three billion
francs. The Maginot Line was also too short for fear of offending the Belgians who
in 1936 declared neutrality and ended all co-operation with France to extend it. In 1914, the Imperial
German Army carried out a grand strategic flanking movement on the French and
British armies by attacking through Belgium.
Lesson learned? In May 1940,
Hitler did exactly the same and, apart from a brief but decisive battle at
Sedan, the Maginot Line did not so much fail as was by-passed. In the end the entire system of
fortifications surrendered to a Wehrmacht
that approached it from a direction it was not designed to defend, behind.
At last month’s
Riga Conference I spoke with several senior commanders and came away with a
profound sense of Maginot unease about NATO’s fitness for its core deterrence
business. My historian’s sense is that
NATO today is becoming a bit like France’s Maginot Line in 1940 or Hitler’s
Atlantic Wall in 1944; a thin forward deployed crust which if broken through would
reveal little more than a large, effectively undefended space. Like the mayhem caused by Panzergruppe Kleist in May 1940 a powerful
air-mobile-tank force could exploit that space long before Allied forces were
able to move up in the required strength to counter them. In such circumstances,
NATO’s defence mission would quickly turn into a rescue mission and possibly
all-out-war. Of course, neither Daladier’s government in 1939 nor (thankfully)
Hitler had nuclear weapons, but given that any Russian action would likely be
‘limited’ in both scope and ambition (although not for the people in its way) the
use of NATO’s strategic nuclear deterrent simply lacks credibility much as British
offers of mutual assistance to Poland in 1939. A deterrence hole.
Filling NATO’s
deterrence hole
NATO’s deterrence
hole is not simply due to a lack of forces in sufficient strength in the right
place. HQ Multinational Corps Northeast is based at Szczecin, Poland and under
the command of the excellent LTG Wojchiekowski. It is also NATO’s “unblinking
eye” on its eastern flank and just took part in Exercise Steadfast Jupiter. However, ‘MNC NE’ is also some 1500
hundred kilometres from the British battlegroup in Estonia that forms part of NATO’s
Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP).
Why? Like the Maginot Line MNC NE’s
area of responsibility is also a consequence of a false understanding of both history
and politics. Some Allies are extremely wary about placing forces in any
strength on the territory of Allies that are also former Warsaw Pact countries
for fear of breaking some tryst with Russia.
First, there is no and never was such a tryst. Second, even if there had been President
Putin abandoned any rights to have any say over NATO deployments in Europe when
he invaded Crimea in 2014. Russian
forces are also growing in strength in Belarus and its Baltic enclave Kaliningrad,
as well as opposite the three Baltic States and for the second time this year
are threatening Ukraine and the wider Black Sea Region. NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence is precisely
that, a presence not a deterrent and what lies behind it, the NATO Response
Force (NRF) is simply not big enough, heavy enough, responsive enough nor
exercised enough to fill NATO’s deterrent hole given what it might face.
The NRF is a
20,000 strong multinational force comprising air, sea, land, maritime and
Special Operations (SOF) tasked with reacting at short notice to all and any
emergencies across the Euro-Atlantic area, including an Article 5
contingency. However, Europe is a very
different place to 2004 when the NRF was formed and although it was ‘enhanced’
in 2014 with the creation of the 5000 strong Very High Readiness Joint Task
Force (VJTF) the personnel came from within its ranks. Enhancing is not strengthening and the NRF
increasingly looks like the EU’s CSDP, a force conceived in a different age for
a different world with NATO’s ‘rapid’ response looking less and less so given
the rapidly changing character of war. Whilst the VJTF is supposed to be able
to react within anywhere between 48 hours and 5 days, the rest of the NRF could
take anywhere up to 30 days, whilst the 40,000 strong Initial Follow-on Group
could take between 60 to 90 days to move.
An analysis of recent Russian exercises suggests that Moscow has
deliberately designed its forces to get inside NATO’s battle rhythm and cause
self-sustained mayhem for 30 days or so, but face growing problems thereafter. In
other words, there is a dangerous symbiosis developing between Russia’s limited
military strength and NATO’s limited military posture.
The Allied Command
Operations Mobile Heavy Force (AMHF)
The consequences
is that the Enhanced Forward Presence is a trip wire to nothing, a thin crust
of deterrence much like the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall, a potentially
fatal weakness further exacerbated by the growing over-stretch of US forces
world-wide which is eroding the Alliance’s military backbone. To plug this
deterrence hole NATO needs to infill SACEUR’s area of responsibility and
urgently. NATO needs to consolidate its various
rapid response forces into one single pool of forces supported by the requisite
force structure and enablers, with a likely centre of gravity somewhere in Poland,
an Allied Command Operations Allied Mobile Heavy Force or AMHF. This new essentially
European NATO force would need to be supported by Polish forces, US V Corps at
Poznan and the German-led Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC) at Ulm. The
AMHF force would act as the deterrent showcase for an Alliance-wide sea-bed to
space future force multi-domain force concept designed to operate across air,
sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge. As such, the AMHF would act as deterrence
reinsurance but would look north, east, south-east and south across a range of
contingencies, including transnational threats.
It could also bolster European strategic responsibility by being able to
operate under either a NATO or an EU flag.
This AMHF would also
be living proof of more equitable transatlantic burden-sharing with its main
purpose to act as a high-end, first responder force sufficiently robust and
responsive, and held at a sufficient level of readiness, to meet all and any
threats to the territory of the European theatre. AMHF would build on the VJTF and NRF, as well
as other very high readiness forces that emerge from the NATO Readiness
Initiative. By merging these forces into
the AMHF it would also better enable NATO to better exploit emerging and
disruptive technologies such as envisioned in the new NATO Artificial
Intelligence Strategy. To that end, the
AMHF would be vital for the introduction into the NATO Order of Battle of the
stuff of future war, such as artificial intelligence, super/quantum computing,
big data, machine-learning, drone swarming, and hypersonic weapon systems. This is because by 2030 NATO’s capacity to engage
in hyper-fast warfare will be vital to NATO’s future deterrence. Above all, the
AMHF would act as the vital technology transmission with high-end US forces and
thus enable NATO’s European pillar to operate both autonomously and maintain a
high degree of interoperability with the fast evolving US military. By 2030, at
the very latest and at the very minimum, the AMHF would need to be Corps-sized.
Where to
begin? One option would be to return the
British-led HQ Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (HQ ARRC) back to the Continent from
its current base at Innsworth in the west of England. It was a profound mistake to move HQ ARRC out
of its base at Rheindahlen in Germany a decade ago, and I said so at the
time. Rather, HQ ARRC could become the
command, control and development hub for the AMHF. Yes, it would cost the
British money, but it would also reinforce Britain’s enduring commitment to the
peace of Europe in the wake of Brexit. Whilst
it would take time for the AMHF to reach Full Operating Capability (FOC) an
Initial Operating Capability (IOC) by, say, 2023 could be to stand up an
all-arms Task Force built around an armoured brigade. Even at ‘IOC’ the AMHF would still need
attack and lift helicopters, engineers, rocket and field artillery, as well as
signals, intelligence, logistics, cyber and missile force protection. ‘Heavy Mobility’ would also mean very
significant self-deployable amounts of equipment suited for the full spectrum
of AMHF missions, as well as C-UAS (counter unmanned aerial systems) and ISTAR
(intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance).
The Alternative?
In 1929, war in
Europe must have seemed as remote to Andre Maginot as it does to so many
Europeans today. Hitler was still a political
lunatic on the far right of the German body politic. Then came the Wall Street
Crash and the Great Depression which suddenly and fundamentally changed the
very nature of power and politics in Europe.
Since 2008, Europe has seen the Great Financial Crash and the pandemic
which has profoundly weakened Europe and again threatens the change the nature
of its politics. The one truism that holds about President Putin is that if he
generates power, or other Europeans give it to him, sooner or later he will use
it. The main purpose of NATO is to stop that. Indeed, that is why NATO is in the deterrence
not the defence business. So, NATO must do whatever it takes to deter and that
means filling its deterrence hole. Unlike
Henry V if defence today fails the
result may not be the miracle of Shakespeare’s imaginings, “When, without stratagem, but in plain shock and
even play of battle, was ever known so great and little loss”.
Julian Lindley-French