“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
