NATO’s Clint Eastwood Doctrine

 “I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?”

Clint Eastwood explains deterrence by denial

Abstract:

The new NATO Strategic Concept is clear, concise, and considered and does exactly what it sets out to do: communicate Allied seriousness about deterrence and defence. It has been published against the backdrop of a major war in Europe and like all such documents is a trade-off between what needs to be done and what can be afforded with transatlantic burden-sharing and European strategic responsibility central to its ethos. The Strategic Concept is one half of a two part strategic realignment of NATO and should ideally be read in conjunction with the NATO Military Strategy. Unfortunately, the Military Strategy is classified.  It adds much of the detail implicit in the Strategic Concept and the NATO 2030 Agenda. There are two critical future NATO deterrence and defence components; lessons for the near term from the Ukraine War and future force interoperability going forward and the balance between technology and manpower. What matters now is that the strategic momentum generated is maintained and the goals and missions both implicit and explicit in the Strategic Concept and the Military Strategy are realised by the European allies, for whom the Madrid Summit was a call to legitimate arms. If so, the NATO Madrid Summit will pass the Riga Test and the good citizens therein can sleep easy in their beds. Time will tell.

The Riga Test

July 5^th. That was the week that was! For many years I have had the distinct honour of attending the wonderful Riga Conference. Each year I set the Riga Test: can the good citizens of Riga sleep easier in their beds than last year.  In 2021, I had my concerns having predicted the war in Ukraine but worried by the continued ‘we only recognise as much threat’ as we can afford defence policies of many NATO European allies and the wilful ignoring of the Russian threat.  In the wake of last week’s NATO Madrid Summit I am somewhat more reassured, but there can be no complacency.

The NATO Deterrence Summit in Madrid was a much needed dose of Allied strategic realism because it committed the Alliance to re-generate a credible and relevant threat to use force against a strategic peer competitor if necessary, implied the will and future capability to do so, together with an understanding of the need for the demonstrable speed to act allied to a clear capacity to inflict punishment. Consequently, NATO’s traditional posture of deterrence by punishment is once again to be reinforced by ‘Go ahead. Make my day’ deterrence. The tragic and criminal slaughter of Ukrainian citizens by Russian forces means it is no longer acceptable to aspire merely to ‘rescue’ the citizens of Allied countries after some possibly 180 days of occupation. Now, the fight will be taken forward against any aggressor from the moment they set a foot on NATO soil. This is important because one of the many lessons of the Ukraine War is that if Russia ever did attack NATO territory it would be on a narrow front and designed to exploit a lack of strategic depth.

However, the devil is in the detail and the detail is quite devilish. NATO’s New Force Model is an act of deterrence in its own right but needs to be delivered and quickly.  The plan is that some 300,000 mainly European troops across the continent soon be placed on high alert (not high readiness) but it needs to be delivered. Finland and Sweden’s accession to the Alliance will extend NATO presence on both the northern and eastern flanks requiring a new concept of victory across a much expanded area of responsibility (AOR). Existing NATO forward deployed defences on the alliance’s eastern flank will be increased to the size of a brigade, which is about 3,000 to 5,000 troops in addition to local forces.

The 2022 NATO Strategic Concept

The centre-piece of the summit was the publication of the first NATO Strategic Concept since 2010. The 2022 Strategic Concept is deterrence and defence heavy and thus has the feel of strategic guidance which is what it is for. It also instructs the Alliance to realign core tasks with capabilities post-Afghanistan in a new age of geopolitical competition to which Europeans are finally awakening. To that end, Strategic Concept 2022 re-confirms NATO’s commitment to collective defence and a 360 degree approach built on three core tasks of deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and co-operative security.  It also affirms the importance of resilience of the ‘home’ base.

The basis for future development is the NATO 2030 Agenda agreed at last year’s Brussels summit. The Agenda can be thus summarised; enough forces to deter, engage crises and build partnerships and enough European forces able to respond quickly to any crisis in and around the Euro-Atlantic Area. That is the sum of an agenda that includes deeper and faster political consultation, strengthened defence and deterrence, improved resilience, preservation of NATO’s technical edge, the upholding of the rules-based order, increased training and capacity-building, and the need to combat and adapt to climate change.  

The Strategic Concept also strikes all the right political chords.  NATO’s purpose and common values are all stressed, particularly on women and security. Reference is also made to further command and control reform and the need for digital transformation, with strong passages on cyber, and emerging and disruptive technologies.  The friction over increasing common funding and defence capacity building also seem to have been resolved, whilst it reaffirms the NATO remains a nuclear alliance that also remains committed to a nuclear-free world.

It is also not the first NATO Strategic Concept to be published against the backdrop of a war. In April 1999, the NATO Washington Summit also published a Strategic Concept against the backdrop of the Kosovo War. However, Strategic Concept 2022 bears some resemblance to MC3/5 “The Strategic Concept for the Defence of the North Atlantic Area” of December 1952, which took place against the backdrop of the Korean War. The 1952 Strategic Concept tried to square the same circle as Strategic Concept 2022 – the need to ease US military overstretch with increased European capabilities and capacities in the face of an economic crisis, a Russian aggressor in Europe, and a Chinese regional-strategic competitor. Both in 1952 and 2022 the elephant in the room concerned Germany and the role it would play in Allied defence.

Russia and its invasion of Ukraine pervades all sixteen pages of the Strategic Concept with a marked change of tone compared to the 2010 Strategic Concept which described Russia as a ‘strategic partner’, even though Russia had invaded Georgia two years prior in 2008.  The 2022 Strategic Concept is far less equivocal. “The Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine has shattered peace and gravely altered our security environment. Its brutal and unlawful invasion, repeated violations of international humanitarian law and heinous attacks and atrocities have caused unspeakable suffering and destruction.” China is now a “systemic challenge” and terrorism the “most direct asymmetric threat”. 

Will the rubber hit the road?

Can ambition and reality be aligned? The Military Strategy is centred on SACEUR’s Area of Responsibility (AOR) wide Strategic Plan (SASP) and the Concept for the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA).  There are two main pillars, the NATO warfighting cornerstone concept (NWCC) and the Deterrence Concept.  The New Force Model at the heart of the Strategic Concept is the consequence of the Military Strategy and it is there one finds the necessary detail. Specifically the call for the enhanced NATO Response Force of some 40,000 troops to be transformed into a future force of some 300,000 troops maintained at high alert, with 44,000 kept at high readiness. For the first time all rapid reaction forces under NATO command will be committed to a deterrence and defence role and all such forces will be consolidated within one command framework.  Whilst the new force will be held at 24 hours ‘Notice to Act’ the bulk of the NATO Force Structure will held at 15 days ‘Notice to Move’, which will be a marked improvement over the current structure in which some forces are 180 days’ notice to move. 

At American behest the new force will be mainly European with Allies on NATO’s Eastern and South-Eastern Flanks agreeing to expanded deployed battalions to brigades of between 3,000-5000 troops. For example, the British have two battlegroups deployed to Estonia and they have now committed to adding an additional battlegroup. Indeed, the UK will commit an extra 1000 troops and a carrier-strike group (???) to the defence of Estonia, the US will send an additional 3000 troops to the Baltic Sea Region, 2 more squadrons of F-35s will be stationed in the UK and two US Navy destroyers sent to Spain. The new Forward Defence strategy will also see heavy equipment pre-positioned near NATO borders. 

A force of that size and with the necessary level of fighting power would normally mean that with rotation there would always be a force of some 100,000 kept at high readiness, which will be extremely expensive for NATO European allies grappling with high inflation and post-COVID economies. A NATO standard brigade is normally between 3200 and 5500 strong. Given that both air and naval forces will also need to be included a land force of, say, 200,000 would need at least 50 to 60 European rapid reaction brigades together with all their supporting elements. At best, there are only 20 to 30 today. There are already concerns being expressed by some Allies.

That is precisely why Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the NATO Defence Investment Pledge of 2% GDP to be spent by each Ally on defence is now “more of a floor than a ceiling”. Several NATO European allies have now committed to increasing their respective defence budgets accordingly. Germany is leading the way (at last) with its commitment to markedly increase its defence budget which is vital given that the Bundeswehr will in future become the central pillar of NATO land deterrence on the eastern flank. The UK has also committed to spend at least 2.5% GDP on defence “this decade”, whilst the Netherlands has committed to a 5.4% real terms increase in defence expenditure over last year’s defence budget allied to spending 2% GDP on defence by 2024.

The sharing of NATO burdens

Whilst the Strategic Concept is mainly a consequence of Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, the forthcoming US National Defense Strategy (NDS) is no less important.  For the first time the NDS places a premium on the support of allies and partners, particularly NATO. NDS 2022 also implies a greater role for allies going forward in assisting the US meet its strategic goals and challenges, particularly in and around the European theatre.  This is because China and the Indo-Pacific are afforded a higher priority than Russia and Europe in NDS 2022, even though Russia is described as an “acute threat”. There are also profound implications for the new NATO future force, in particular the challenge of maintaining interoperability in high-end conflicts with the US future force. The US future force will be built on three principles: “integrated deterrence” and credible combat power (including nuclear forces); effective campaigning in the grey zone; and “building enduring advantage” by exploiting new, emerging and disruptive technologies. NATO European forces?

For NATO the message from the Americans is clear: if the US security guarantee for Europe is to be credibly maintained going forward Europeans are going to have to share the defence burdens far more equitably, with 50% of NATO’s minimum capability requirements by 2030 probably the least the Americans will expect of their allies.   That will mean Europeans taking on far more strategic responsibility than hitherto within the framework of the Alliance and all Allies will need to develop an expeditionary mind-set, even the Finns.  In time, greater European strategic responsibility will inevitably lead to capacity for European tactical and eventually strategic autonomy.      

NATO’s Big 2030 Plan

The Strategic Concept and the Military Strategy together are NATO’s Big 2030 Plan. The plan involves two phases much of which will need to run concurrently. Phase one involves identifying and learning the lessons of the Ukraine War to bolster deterrence, defence and resilience in the short-term. War is a giant black hole into which people and materiel vanish at an alarming rate far beyond that envisaged by peacetime establishments. NATO European forces will need for more robust logistics forward deployed, with enhanced and far more secure military supply chains particularly important. Far more materiel is also needed, most notably ammunition. If NATO deterrence and defence are to be credible Allies will also need to rebuild and build infrastructure to assist military mobility and remove all legal impediments to rapid cross border movements in a pre-war emergency. Deployed NATO forces will also need much improved force protection with the need to reduce the detectability and thus digital footprint of force concentrations (‘bright butterflies’). 

The war in Ukraine has also revealed the vulnerability of armour unsupported by infantry and helicopters in the battlespace, as well as the need for NATO forces to be able to dominate both fires and counter-fires.  Much of the vulnerability of Russian forces is due to the effectiveness of expendable drones, strike drones and loitering systems allied to precision-guided munitions. NATO forces need an awful lot more of all such systems across the tactical and the strategic. Enhanced land-based, protected battlefield mobility will also be needed together with increased force command resilience given how often the Ukrainians have been able to detect and ‘kill’ Russian forward (and less forward) deployed headquarters.

Thankfully, given that NATO is a defensive alliance, the war in Ukraine has also revealed the extent to which the defence has dominated the offence if forces are reasonably matched.  Whilst no-one envisages a return to some kind of twenty-first century equivalent of the Maginot Line secure pre-positioned capabilities and access to individual ready reserves will be vital.  There is one other lesson NATO leaders and commanders need to learn given the attritional nature of the war: do not sacrifice significant mass to afford a little manoeuvre. Britain, are you listening?

Beyond NATO’s horizon

NATO must also look beyond 2030 and develop a hard core future war concept if deterrence by denial now enshrined in NATO doctrine is to remain credible. In addition to the Military Strategy the new SACEUR, General Chris Cavioli and his team must also set the future force agenda with something akin to the 1952 Long-Term Defence Plan with the aim of forging a markedly transformed military instrument of power by 2030.  Such a plan will need to include strengthened forces postures, news structures & forces, a much expanded NATO Readiness Initiative with supporting plans & concepts, transformed training & exercises not dissimilar to the famous Battle Schools set up by General Harold Alexander during World War Two, and a proper understanding where capability, capacity, manpower and interoperability meet, especially when it involves new emerging and destructive technologies.

In other words, the true test of Madrid’s legacy will be the standing up of a high-end, collective, US-interoperable, strategically autonomous (if needs be) European-led Allied Mobile Heavy Force able to operate as a powerful first responder in a pre-war emergency in and around Europe and across the domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge from sea-bed to space at the highest levels of conflict complete with its own combat support and enablers.  Nothing less will suffice to meet the ambition implicit in the NATO Strategic Concept.  Are Europeans up to the challenge? Some leaders are already looking to slide out of their respective commitments partly because they never really understand what they have signed up to until their finance ministers present the bill/check. So, here’s a novel idea. Turn the NATO defence planning process on its head. Let the experts identify the defence architecture NATO will need by 2030 and beyond, together with the capabilities, capacities, structures and organisation to support it. Then sit down again and agree how it can be afforded and fielded.

Critics suggest that the Strategic Concept’s conciseness is a weakness, that it is light on facts. What did they expect? NATO’s strategic and political goals are now far more closely aligned with NATO’s Military Strategy, the first such demarche since 1962, implying a new relationship between effectiveness, efficiency and affordability.  Critics also fail to understand the purpose of a Strategic Concept or its relationship with the NATO Military Strategy. A NATO Strategic Concept is essentially a contract between leader and practitioner in which the former instructs the latter what the Alliance must minimally ensure and assure over the coming decade or so and publicly commit to those goals. It is not a public relations document per se, even if it does play such a role. 

In time, the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept could well come to be seen as a landmark document that set the direction of travel for the Alliance in a new “age of strategic competition”, in much the same way as the December 1967 MC14/3. However, that will only happen if the Alliance adopts the “Clint Doctrine”. For that reason Secretary-General Stoltenberg and his team are to be congratulated for being bold. 'I know what you're thinking. Did they fire all they have? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is NATO, the most powerful military alliance in the world and could blow you clean away, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?'

Sleep well, Riga.

Julian Lindley-French

 

 

Putin the Great’s NATO

 

 “I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself.”

Peter the Great’s Russian Empire 1721

Putin the Great’s NATO

The war in Ukraine is at a crucial moment. A bloody race is underway in Luhansk between a severely damaged Russian Army and its separatist supporters, and a tired Ukrainian Army that is slowly being reinforced by Western weapons.  It will likely be early July before the schwerpunkt really meets a culminating point in the current phase of the war, but where is NATO? In the one hundred or so days since President Putin launched his brutal invasion of the Alliance has learnt about the capabilities of the Russian armed forces. At the end of June, the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept will be agreed at the Madrid Summit. Finland and Sweden are on the cusp of joining the Alliance, Turkey permitting, and even countries like the Netherlands have now decided to meet the 2% benchmark of the Defence Investment Pledge (albeit briefly) after years of reality-defying resistance.

This week President Putin made a remark that revealed his anachronistic Realpolitik world-view.  Russia, he said, was merely “reclaiming” the lands of Peter the Great. Perhaps the most crucial decision taken by Alliance Heads of State and Government will be the commitment to a new forward defence force posture. There is a kind of paradoxical perverse symbiosis at play in that Putin will finally get the very NATO he has warned against precisely because of his own calamitous and criminal actions. Putin’s world-view can be thus summarised; “I consent to the West’s sphere of influence which includes all existing EU and NATO members, but only on the condition the West consents to Russia’s sphere of influence which includes Ukraine. If the West contests Russia’s sphere of influence I will contest the margins of the West’s sphere’.

NATO and the US National Defense Strategy 2022

Whither NATO? The NATO Strategic Concept is meant to be the driving force of NATO strategy for the next decade or so. However, given the centrality of US forces to the all-important Alliance deterrence and defence policy the new US National Defense Strategy is perhaps a more useful indicator, and more importantly, a better test of the extent to which NATO will need to adapt by 2030 if the Alliance is to remain credible in its core tasks.

The primary mission of National Defence Strategy (NDS) 2022 is to shape and size the US future force and the budget that pays for it. NDS 2022 thus links resources to strategy to force. For the first time NDS 2022 places a particular premium on the support of allies and partners, and thus implicitly NATO. In short, NDS 2022 implies a far greater role for allies going forward in assisting the US meet its strategic goals and challenges, particularly in and around the European theatre. As such, the language in the NDS would certainly be recognisable to those charged with drafting the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept, although NDS 2022 affords China and the Indo-Pacific a higher priority than Russia and Europe, even though it describes Russia as an “acute threat”.

NATO 2030 and NDS 2022

It will be interesting to see if both NATO Agenda 2030 and the NATO Strategic Concept rise to that challenge. If not, there could well be a large funding and capability hole somewhere mid-Atlantic.  Like the NATO Strategic Concept NDS 2022 is quite a smorgasbord. NDS 2022 follows on from NDS 2018 which switched the US strategic emphasis away from strategic counter-terrorism back to great power competition. Consequently, both the Nuclear Posture Review and the Missile Defense Review have also been incorporated into NDS 2022. The four defence priorities reinforce that shift: (1) the pacing, sizing and shaping of the US future force to meet the challenge of China; (2) the importance of credible deterrence against “strategic attacks” and “aggression”; (3) the need to “prevail (not win) in conflict when necessary”; and (4) the creation of a resilient Joint Force and what is called the “defence eco-system”, a complex network of civilian and military stakeholders and partners. Interestingly, increased resilience is not simply limited to deployed force protection, but also applied to the US home base. NDS 2022 emphasises the vital need of the US to be able to recover from mass disruption caused by both “kinetic and non-kinetic threats”. Sub-strategic threats, such as North Korea, Iran and violent extremism are now to be “managed”, whilst “trans-boundary” threats, such as climate change and pandemics, must be “adapted”.

The US future force also affords the NATO future force a clear direction of travel. The force will be built on three principles, “integrated deterrence” and the generation of credible combat power (including nuclear forces), the capacity to undertake effective campaigning in the grey zone; and the need to build “enduring advantage” by exploiting new, emerging and disruptive technologies.

As ever, the utility of NDS 2022 will depend on the public money invested in it by Congress. There are already some indicators. Whilst the agreed budget for the European Deterrence Initiative for FY2023 will be $4.2bn, the ‘Pacific Deterrence Initiative’ will receive $6bn.  For those NATO allies reading the runes of NDS 2022 the message is clear: if the US security guarantee for Europe is to be credibly maintained going forward Europeans are going to have to share the defence burdens far more equitably, with 50% of NATO’s minimum capability requirements by 2030 probably the least the Americans will expect of their allies. 

Military implications of NDS 2022 for NATO

In 2019, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR) General Tod Wolters, produced the first NATO Military Strategy since 1962, with Russia and terrorism identified as the main threats.  The Military Strategy considers the best use of Allied force in the competition phase, crisis phase and conflict phase. Another document, the Defence and Deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic Area or DDA operationalises the Military Strategy by governing actions inside SACEUR’s area or responsibility (AOR) and relations with partners beyond. The DDA also drives a series of military plans that provide direction for the critical work of the three Joint Force Commands (JFCs) in Brunssum, Naples and Norfolk, Virginia.  With Finland and Sweden soon to join the Alliance a fourth JFC could be established covering the soon-to-be enlarged Northern Flank of the Alliance.  Such a new command would certainly help NATO better align plans with Allies in regions, albeit through yet more bureaucratisation of the NATO Command Structure. Whilst the Joint Force Commands are vital there are still simply too many commands in NATO and not enough force.

Whilst some 90% of SACEUR’s military plans are now complete, it will be the last 10% (as ever) that will prove the most challenging. The task of realising them will fall to the new SACEUR, US Army General Chris Cavioli.  The critical challenge and thus true test of the Alliance given HDS 2022 will be finalising the minimum European military requirements vital to ensuring Allied deterrence and defence remain credible in ALL circumstances, most notably if the Americans are busy elsewhere.

Putin the Great? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has clearly accelerated and focused NATO defence planning, not least because after some debate the DDA has now been adopted by the North Atlantic Council (NAC). Crucially, more devolved command authority has been given to SACEUR by the NAC which means Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons can now conduct more operations in the competition phase of conflict, thus better preparing the Alliance for both crisis management and war early in the conflict cycle. Further bolstering deterrence is the decision to activate all the graduated response plans (GRPs) and appropriate crisis response operations (CROs) as a direct response to Putin’s aggression. For example, SACEUR now has operational command authority over some 42,000 combat troops, 60 plus warships and 100s of combat aircraft now in Eastern Europe as part of the enhanced NATO Response Force (eNRF).

Forward, flexible NATO

NATO’s longer-term military posture in the wake of the Russo-Ukraine War is now also being actively considered with Forward Defence and Flexible Response likely to be the mantras. Back to the Future? Since 2019 General Wolters and his Allied team have done a lot to harmonise US and NATO military strategies for the simple vital reason that the Americans remain the hard backbone of Allied forces. NATO authorities also have become markedly bolder than hitherto. A new NATO Military Posture will be adopted at the Madrid Summit that for the first time establishes coherent military command at a level above the forces committed to the Enhanced Forward Presence on NATO’s eastern flank. The new posture will not only help close a command gap between headquarters and deployed forces, but also enable more integrated land, sea, and air operations.

The Alliance and the allies will also further invest in a host of advanced military capabilities in order to meet new and enduring challenges across all operational domains. The aim is for NATO to be able to deliver an array of robust and sophisticated capabilities across all such domains. This will include heavier, more high-end, technologically advanced, and better-supported forces and capabilities at the required state of readiness in sufficient capacity to be rotated effectively for the duration of any crisis. The Alliance will also continue to improve and adapt the sustainability, deployability, and interoperability of its forces at the higher end of the conflict spectrum in a demanding strategic environment, particularly the conduct of high-end operations. National capability development plans will support the full and timely generation of such capabilities, in line with the NATO Defence Planning Process.

Job done?

However, far more needs to be done by the Alliance.  The NATO Command and Force Structure remains untested. The NATO Readiness Initiative needs to be markedly expanded. The release mechanisms by which national forces are placed under SACEUR’s command need to be harmonised, streamlined and much accelerated. There is also a command and force ‘hole’ to NATO’s south-east in the Black Sea Region.  In short, those inside the NATO bubble need to stop believing their own rhetoric and stop trying to convince the rest of us to follow suit. A good start would be to properly learn the lessons of the Ukraine War, not least the vital need for sufficient stocks of munitions given how quickly modern war eats them up.  War stocks are a vital indicator of credible deterrence.

Above all, NATO really needs to begin thinking far more cogently about future war, the new battlespace beyond 2030 and the very concept of deterrence and defence in the twenty-first century. The automisation and digitisation of warfare across the mosaic of hybrid, cyber and hyperwar will accelerate and possibly exponentially. Above all, the NATO European Allies need to deliver on what they promise. If not, Putin the Great could one day seek to fill the hole between NDS 2022 and the NATO Strategic Concept.

So, good start NATO but much, much more needs to be done. Still none of the above would have been possible without the incompetent ‘statecraft’ of the distinctly un-great President Putin who desperately wants an empire because he is unable to conquer himself.

Julian Lindley-French

 

 

1952-2022 THANK YOU!

 1952-2022 THANK YOU!

Putin’s Ground Truth?

 

“Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach”.

Joseph Stalin

Ground truth?

May 10^th, 2022. What is Putin’s Weltanschaaung? What is his ground truth? To understand that one needs to reach back into Russia’s tragic past and understand the Russian elite’s obsession with the West, primarily Germany, and their tawdry belief that the lands in-between are little more than pawns in their never-ending addiction to incompetent Realpolitik.

Victory Day, or Den Pobedy as the Russians would have it, did not see Putin declare all-out war on Ukraine, although his speech was a catalogue of lies about NATO, Nazis, nukes and the existential threat from no-one Russia apparently faces. Putin needs an existential threat to Russia precisely because he offers precious little else to the Russian people. Victory Day is not just about the Great Patriotic War. It is also a metaphor for the creation of the Soviet empire that subjugated much of Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 in the guise of ‘liberating’ Europeans from Nazism.  That latter reflection is perhaps the most important takeaway from this year’s underwhelming parade given the tragedy Putin is inflicting on Ukraine.  The fact that General Valery Gerasimov was unable to attend because he is in hospital recovering from his wounds is almost another metaphor for Putin’s hopeless and desperate gamble.

Victory Day had been meant to commemorate Putin’s strategic victory in the Ukraine War and the imposition of his nationalistic Soviet-style, anti-Nazi ideology on the Ukrainian people. Instead, it was an essentially defensive exercise in political expectation management.  This is because Putin’s ground truth is driven by his own survival in a country that has no mechanism for peaceful political change or the ability to adapt. Take Britain. A century ago the British ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen but soon lost it.  Britain adapted and became a modern European liberal democracy. The problem for Putin and Russia is an inability to adapt to a changing world.

War and peace 

What are the lessons from history? Firstly, it is not Muscovite liberals who worry Putin, much though the West wishes it. It is the ultra-nationalists to Putin’s (hard-to-believe) political right who really do believe in Stalin’s maxim that all that matters is how far the Russian Army can reach.  Thankfully for much of Europe, and only for the moment, it is not very far, but it will not always be so. A study of Russian military history suggests that whilst the Kremlin finds it hard to adapt, given time the Russian General Staff does not.

Implicit in Putin’s Victory Day speech was an inferiority complex with the ‘West’ from which Russian leaders have suffered at least as far as Peter the Great and the seventeenth century. This is evident in Putin’s repeated references to past Russian heroes, such as Alexander Nevsky and the struggle against the Teutonic Knights, and even if Prince Grigori Potemkin would have been more appropriate.

However, it is Russia’s tortured twentieth century history which is most relevant to Putin’s Weltanschaaung, particularly Moscow’s complicated, duplicitous, Realpolitik relations with Germany. Indeed, Putin’s Realpolitik can be traced back to one event: the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Lenin’s Bolshevik regime felt as much aggrieved by the Treaty of Versailles as Weimar Germany.  Both Moscow and Berlin believed the terms imposed on them by the victorious World War One allies, several of whom supported the anti-Bolshevik Russian White Army in the 1919 civil war, were unduly harsh.  The tipping point was the failed 1922 Treaty of Genoa.  British Prime Minister Lloyd George was all-too aware that Versailles far from ending the war to end all wars would simply delay another blood reckoning in Europe and endeavoured to bring all the European powers together at the Conference of Genoa to give the League of Nations some teeth.  However, with the absence of the United States and France’s reluctance Lloyd George’s demarche was always going to be a long shot.

Even as Lloyd George was prematurely celebrating the success of his new European security order at Genoa Russia and Germany were meeting secretly at Rapallo where they established ‘friendly relations’ based on Germany’s need for raw materials and Russia’s supply of it. Nothing new there then. Rapallo also had secret clauses, which were meant to have been outlawed by Versailles that led to the Germans being offered facilities in Russia to test both tanks and aircraft illegal under Versailles.  The tank testing centre was led by one Heinz Guderian wo twenty years later would come back with his panzer armies to devastate the Soviet Union.

In spite of the 1925 Treaty of Locarno at which Britain and France sought to normalise relations with Weimar Germany and in return for the confirmations of post-Versailles borders the Russo-German accord doomed Europe to catastrophe. Taken together with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the failed World Disarmament Conference between 1932 and 1934, US isolationism and British and French impoverishment Genoa, Rapallo and Locarno set a fragile pattern for European security relations in the interbellum and beyond.  In the self-willed absence of the United States from Europe Britain and France simply lacked the power and the will to engage in European Realpolitik, not least because of their focus on vulnerable global empires.  In the vacuum Germany, the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s equally aggrieved fascist Italy set about revising the European order in their favour. For much of the interbellum the British and French political establishments saw Bolshevism and the Soviet Union as the major threat to the established European order.

And then came Hitler. It became increasingly obvious in the wake of the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Anschluss in 1938 that the fragile European order would soon collapse. Fearing a repeat of 1914-1918 only British prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain continued to harbour naïve hopes that Hitler could be convinced of the merits of disarmament. France, meanwhile, had politically imploded during the Popular Front governments. As it became ever clearer that Nazi Germany intended to destroy Versailles by force if needs be a race developed between Britain and France and Stalin’s Soviet Union to ensure that Hitler would attack the other first.

The lands in between

The victims of this European Great Game were the lands in between and its icon was Munich.  First, in September 1938 Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the ‘peace in our time’ Munich agreement by which Chamberlain believed he had bought off Hitler with the Sudetenland. Second, when it became clear that Hitler also wanted ‘lebensraum’ in Poland and Ukraine Stalin began to see the threat. Third, firm in their belief that Bolshevism and Nazism were such mortal enemies London and Paris naively believed they might form some form of pact with the Soviet Union to contain Hitler. They thought Stalin would be amenable to such a pact because he had just decimated the senior command of the Red Army through purges.  In 1939 the Russians were also humiliated by the Finns on the Mannerheim Line in circumstances of incompetence eerily similar to today’s Ukraine War.

However, Hitler and Stalin were also the ultimate practitioners of Realpolitik in spite of their fundamental ideological struggle.  In August 1939, much to the shock of Britain and France, they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (named after their respective foreign ministers of the time) even as a British military mission was in Moscow. The Pact not only ensured that Hitler would first seek to drive Britain and France out of the war, it also sealed the brutal fate of the lands in between Germany and Russia. At Brest in September 1939 Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union, under the terms of yet another secret protocol, whilst in June 1940 Stalin invaded the Baltic States.

Perhaps the most telling echo of the past, albeit the reverse of Germany’s thinking in 2022, was Stalin’s belief that Hitler’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union was the best security guarantee. After all, in early 1941 the Soviet Union supplied 74% of Germany’s phosphate, 67% of its asbestos, and 65% of its chrome, 55% of its manganese, 40% of its nickel and 35% of its oil, all of which were vital for the conduct of Hitler’s war in the West.  In January 1941, Germany and the Soviet Union even signed a new trade agreement that made Berlin reliant upon Moscow for 70% of its trade. And yet, in June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.  For three days Stalin was paralyzed by shock.   

 Just in case or Just in time?

What of today? Those in the West calling for a cease-fire should be careful not to again confuse diplomacy with appeasement and simply confirm Russia in its ill-gotten gains. Those same people must also be careful not to see Ukraine as a large country faraway about which we know little, a la Chamberlain. The 2022 Ukraine War, for that is what it is, is resetting the strategic and geopolitical context of NATO, Europe and the wider world. As I told NATO ambassadors Putin is forcing the world of globalised just-in-time back to the hard Realpolitik of just-in-case. He is reminding European leaders who have for too long abandoned sound defence of the dangers of being seduced by economists who do not understand that power and coercion can exist independently of supply and demand. 

 Today, the Western allies must thus again confront two potentially existential questions that are red in tooth and claw. How can peace be preserved? How can NATO deterrence and defence really deter and defend into the future? European history is again entering a darkened room and it is vital that all the democracies go forward together with a mind-set robust enough, collective enough and ambitious enough to stop the corrupt, cynical and corrosive regime in Moscow that was on show on May 9th. Facing down Putin’s Weltanschaaung (and China if it so chooses to be an enemy) will take a unity of effort and purpose not seen since NATO’s formation.

Given that the West now faces a choice. Force Ukraine to accept Putin’s ground truth on Ukraine’s ground and thus enable Moscow to impose its system as far as Putin’s army can reach, or commit to a clear set of strategic aims that culminate with the return eventually to the restoration of Ukraine’s borders. If Ukraine is forced to face a frozen stalemate on Russian terms those in Western Europe who imposed it on Kyiv will be the natural heirs of Chamberlain ad any such ‘accord’, far from being a success of diplomacy merely the latest ‘peace in our time’ appeasers.  Why not sign it in Munich?

However, before any longer term strategy can be established it is vital Ukraine is given the means to resist the latest Russian offensive. Specifically, that means denying the Russians success in the first phase of their current operation, the seizure of an axis that links Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhina, Kostyantyniska, and Donetsk, which if successful would turn a salient into a pocket enabling Russian air power to destroy Ukrainian regular army formations, much like the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B in the Falaise Gap in August 1944. Without securing that objective the Russians will be unable to conduct phase 2 of the offensive and the clear-out of Ukrainian forces up to the Donetsk Oblast border.   Only when this offensive has succeeded/failed can 'we' (whomsoever that is going forward) properly tailor Western support over campaign time and space. What matters now is maintaining the coherence, manoeuvre and counter-attack fighting power of engaged Ukrainian forces.

The simple and tragic truth about Putin’s ground truth is that once again it is the lands in between who are paying the ultimate price for Russia’s geopolitical folly, malpractice, paranoia and sheer incompetence. Putin’s ‘ground truth’ is in fact no truth and his Weltanschaaung is the corrupt view of a corrupt history by a corrupt elite.   NATO’s job is to ensure that the Russian Army can only impose the Russian system within Russia’s legitimate borders now and into the future.

 Julian Lindley-French

 

My Speech to NATO Ambassadors Yesterday

Yesterday, I had the singular honour of addressing NATO ambassadors, senior officials and high-ranking officers at the famous Manfred Woerner Circle lunch. This is my speech. All best, Julian

 The Impact of the Ukraine Crisis on NATO 2030.

 

Ambassador, thank you! Excellencies, distinguished officers and colleagues, great honour to address this famous circle named after a great man and servant of our great Alliance. As I get old there are few things in which I trust. Our Alliance is one of them but we cannot take it for granted.  To quote the American economist J.K. Galbraith “power is as power does”. Even dumb power. To quote Lindley-French, “until someone bloody stops them”. Normally, I would begin such remarks with a joke, and normally a bad one at that. The situation is too serious, too dangerous for that. 2000 km from here a fellow European country is being mutilated by a great power and a nuclear one at that. Given that, and what is to come, I want to focus on four core themes: strategic concept, deterrence, burden-sharing and future war.

 

New Cold War

 

This is the start of a long war leading, I fear, to a new Cold War.  It will reach across our societies through deception, disinformation, disruption, destabilisation and coercion through implied or actual destruction.

 

The war will continue as long as President Putin is in power. Possibly longer. What does he want? Well, just look at a map. Make no mistake, this is also one of those geopolitical moments for which our alliance was created. This is also what NATO was created for back in 1949.

 

A Europe Whole and Free?

 

Let me paraphrase another great man: from the Black Sea in the south to Kirkenes in the north a rust-encased iron curtain is again falling across parts of Europe. Unless stopped by our Alliance in its full majesty behind that curtain of oppression could one day again lie the capitals of ancient states, famous cities and peoples, and all subject in one form or another, not only to Russian influence, but to a very high and, ever increasing measure of control, from Moscow. The 2022 Ukraine War, for that is what it is, has reset the strategic and geopolitical context of NATO, Europe and the wider world. We are moving from the fantasy globalised world of just–in-time back to the hard reality of just-in-case. For too long European leaders abandoned sound defence seduced by economists who failed to understand power and coercion can exist independently of supply and demand. We, our Alliance, must thus again confront two potentially existential questions. How can we preserve the peace? How can we ensure NATO deterrence and defence deters and defends into the future? European history is again entering a darkened room. We must go forward together with a mind-set robust enough, collective enough and ambitious enough to stop the corrupt, cynical and corrosive regime in Moscow from prevailing. In other words, facing down Russia (and China if it so chooses to be an enemy) will take a unity of effort and purpose not seen since our alliance faced 360 Soviet divisions across the once inner-German border… and do it whilst we also engage with our partners to the south in their struggle with maniacal anti-state.

 

NATO 2030 Agenda

 

Remember when the NATO 2030 agenda was adopted by leaders last June. It highlighted the need for deeper political consultation, strengthened defence and deterrence, improved resilience, preserving NATO’s technical edge, upholding the rules-based order, boosting training and capacity-building, combating and adapting to climate change, and investing in NATO. But, above all, it called for drafting a strategic concept that is truly strategic.

 

The thing is, that was June. Now is now. Then we were in the last days of tentative peace, now we are on the threshold of future war. Tear it up?  No. But understand this (and some among us are finding it hard to understand this) whilst the words might sound the same they mean very different things today than they did last June – timing and context are everything in geopolitics. Our collective (and it must be collective) level of ambition must now be far higher than it was last year because if nothing else deterring great power is no longer a theoretical exercise. It has suddenly become the new normal.

 

Strategic Concept

 

Therefore, the real challenge for the forthcoming Strategic Concept will be to capture that change and the change to come by 2030 and beyond and get in front of it. Will it? You see Strategic Concepts are not some PR brochure. They are a public contract between our elected leaders and you, the people who make NATO work. A contract that demonstrates our leaders understand the strategic goals and missions they are setting you and the relationship between the ends, ways and means you will need to succeed. Change or renewal? The US? Europe? Future war.

 

The Americans are as committed to NATO as ever. Partly because they need allies, albeit capable allies, and more not less every day, but also because NATO remains central to American statecraft. However, as China stretches US forces and resources the world over we, the European allies, will have to share more of the burdens of Alliance, even at the high-end of conflict.

 

Some might call it greater European strategic autonomy, some might call it greater European strategic responsibility, either way for all the many pressures we Europeans face, financial and societal, it is simply time Europe grew up strategically. Frankly, the alliance is the only vehicle of weight that can carry such ambition.

 

Do not get me wrong: the EU-NATO privileged relationship, or whatever it is called these days, will be vital for enhancing resilience. If we cannot protect our home base I find it hard to believe we will have the political hardness and resolve to project the power contemporary and future deterrence and defence will demand.   We could simply end up deterring ourselves.

 

I have the honour to chair the Alphen Group. Some of you will have read our Shadow NATO Strategic Concept which we had the honour to present in this house in February. We are clear: we call for the maintenance of the three core tasks – collective defence, crisis management and co-operative security. However, they must be turbo-charged with ambition, capabilities and capacities. We also call for a new priority of enhanced resilience in the face of the hybrid, cyber and hyperwar that our Alliance will need to grip by 2030, both directly and in partnership.

 

Future war

 

Here’s the crunch. Our Alliance not only needs to grip emerging security challenges, but also emerging defence challenges. They are a continuum. And, do not be lulled into complacency by the incompetence of Russian planning and performance in Ukraine. The direction of travel of warfare is clear, and thus deterrence and defence.  The next ten years could well see the equivalent of the past 70 years of technology crammed into the future battlespace. By 2030, certainly 2040, war could even be faster than human responsiveness driven by machine-learning, quantum computing, and a whole host of artificially intelligent hypersonic weapons and swarms of drones that will begin to see, decide, act and destroy autonomously, if not independently. Let me quote directly from my latest book Future War and the Defence of Europe written with my great friends Generals John Allen and Ben Hodges: “…the danger persists that Europeans are moving inexorably towards a lowest common denominator European force, an analogue ‘European Army’ in a digital age which simply bolts together a lot of European legacy forces”.  Yes, we Europeans have modestly increased our defence budgets since 2014 – both real and imagined. But defence and deterrence is relative and is it enough in the face of the pressures building on the US, the advances of enemies and surging inflation?

 

Strategic Concept 2022 must also offer an affordable vision of credible NATO deterrence and defence in 2030 and beyond. In both the book and the Shadow Strategic Concept we call for a hard core NATO centred on a high-end European future force, the Allied Mobile Heavy Force (AMHF), that would merge all of NATO’s high readiness forces, that is sufficiently capable to act as a credible first responder in the event of a major European emergency should US forces also be engaged in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere. A force that has sufficient mass that it can act as a high-end first responder for any contingency and reinforce support front-line states to Europe’s south as they grapple with the potentially catastrophic collapse of order across the Middle East and North Africa. A force that is sufficiently manoeuvrable to act effectively across the multiple domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge.  A force able to operate from sea-bed to space.

 

Hard Core NATO

 

Ambassador, Excellencies, distinguished officers and colleagues, if NATO 2030 is to be realised beyond the comfortingly rhetorical it will need far more ways and means to realise the ends of preserving peace. The bottom-line is this: without a hard military warfighting European-led core NATO could fail. If President Putin is still around he will not stop. It all comes back to deterrence. You see the thing about deterrence is ‘the other’ needs to believe we believe in our own policy and position. Only capability, capacity reinforced by demonstrable can assure that. Equally, we also need to re-think how, who and what it is we are deterring across the interactive and interoperable hybrid, cyber and super-fast hyper war that is coming capable yet?

 

NATO’s bottom-line is SACEUR’s Area of Responsibility (AOR) Wide Strategic Plan (SASP). It is the concept for the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) which upholds the defensive nature of the alliance and sets out how NATO armed forces plan to deal with the Alliance’s two main threats, Russia and terrorism.  It is the NATO Warfighting Cornerstone Concept and the Deterrence Concept. Give them the tools and they will do the job! That means an Allied Command Transformation that can really reach out and transform, it means Allied Command Operations reinforced by a much more ambitious NATO Readiness Initiative. It needs fielding times of advanced equipment in Europe sufficiently fast and in sufficient quantity that me, the taxpayer, is not paying premium euro for museum pieces. We simply can no longer simply recognise as much threat as we can afford.

 

WHAT DO I MEAN BY THAT? LET US COLLECTIVELY THINK CREATIVELY AND MERGE EFFECTIVENESS WITH EFFICIENCY. LET US TURN THE NATO DEFENCE PLANNING PROCESS ON ITS HEAD. LET THE EXPERTS IN THIS ROOM IDENTIFY THE DEFENCE ARCHITECTURE WE WILL NEED BY 2030, THE CAPABILITIES, CAPACITIES, STRUCTURES AND ORGANISATION THAT SUPPORT IT. THEN, LET’S WORK OUT HOW WE AFFORD IT FROM EXISTING INVESTMENTS, NEW PARTNERSHIPS AND, YES, SOME NEW MONEY. LET US FOR ONCE BE RADICAL. THAT IS THE DEMAND OF THIS AGE.

 

The Impact of the Ukraine Crisis on NATO 2030.

 

NATO is not a glorified summit organising agency. It is a defensive warfighting alliance that seeks to prevent wars by demonstrating to anyone or anything threatening our citizens that it can. That means all of our citizens from Stavanger to San Francisco, from Tallinn to Lampedusa, from Riga to Svalbard. By 2030 we will need a truly transformed NATO if we are to preserve a rules-based global order. If not a global NATO, a NATO that is certainly in the world. That means a real NATO China policy. Any power that weakens US forces also weakens NATO and the American security guarantee to Europe. Indeed, anyone who suggests China has nothing to do with NATO is, to coin a phrase, brain dead. We will also need at some point to rehabilitate arms control in Europe. 

 

A transformed NATO by 2030? The NATO Innovation Fund and the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic are good starts, but we will need to go far further, far faster.  Are we up to the challenge?

 

In other words, what is decided by you and your bosses in these coming months is not just about the here and now. It is about 2030 and thereafter. It is about the tipping point in geopolitics we are at. Ambassador, Excellencies, distinguished officers and colleagues, as another famous leader once famously said at another infamously dangerous moment: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Our comparative advantage? Our people. Let’s give them the tools so they can do the job.

 

Let us stand together to defend freedom and democracy because it needs it. Give me a Strategic Concept I can believe in and which President Putin can believe in. Give me a Strategic Concept that delivers deterrence and defence 2030. Let us be NATO!

 

Ambassador, thank you.

 

Julian Lindley-French, NATO HQ, April 25^th, 2022

 

 

What if Russia Attacked NATO?

 “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

Article 5, North Atlantic Treaty, April 1949

The tipping point

April 22^nd, 2022. Last weekend I was watching a clip of “60 Minutes’, Russia’s flagship ‘news/propaganda’ programme on Rossiya 1. It was quite shocking even by the low standards of Putin’s main propaganda programme. The anchor, Olga Skabeyeva, had several guests, but the show was dominated by a bombastic, nationalist motor-mouth. His child-like self-pitying thesis was that the sinking of the Moskva was a tipping point in the Russo-Ukraine War because the Ukrainians had had the temerity to attack the ‘Motherland’.  He conveniently forgot that it was the ‘Motherland’ that had just invaded a neighbouring democratic country that borders both the EU and NATO.  He also suggested that Russia was already fighting World War Three because “NATO’s infrastructure” was being used to arm Ukraine’s defence. Russia, he suggested, would be perfectly within its rights to attack targets such as railway junctions in Poland through which Western arms and supplies were travelling en route to Ukraine. Russia he said, should decisively escalate to de-escalate.

What if Russia did attack NATO Poland? First, NATO would respond. The North Atlantic Council would meet in emergency session to decide what specific action would be needed to restore deterrence. No response would pretty much mark the end of NATO. Second, the NATO response would need to be decisive, tailored and proportionate. Third, NATO would need to embark on an extensive ‘strategic communications’ campaign to explain its actions to citizens and the Kremlin alike.

Options and contingencies

NATO would also need to confront several internal issues which go to the very heart of Allied deterrence now and into the future. Would there be sufficient political cohesion within the Alliance to overcome the escalation aversion that not unreasonably exists, particularly in parts of Western Europe? Take Germany as THE example of this profound question. Faced by a hard left faction within the SPD, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ‘defence revolution’ is already stalling and his commitment to Ukraine’s defence is wobbly at best. What would be the exact nature and scope of a NATO response? There would be several options all of which would be both proportionate and risky. If Russia attacked critical railway junctions in Poland, American and British nuclear submarines could launch cruise missile strikes on Russian railway infrastructure vital to the supply and re-supply of Russian forces or the ‘reconstitution centres’ at which they are massing for the offensive in Eastern Ukraine. The Suwalki Corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad could be closed and an attack of similar scale mounted on the enclave’s air defence systems.  NATO could also blockade the Black Sea and conduct a missile strike against a Russian warship. The degree of warning, if any, of the above courses of action would depend on what level of warning the Russians gave prior to their initial attack on NATO soil and the strength of message NATO leaders felt compelled to send to Putin.  However, given the fevered atmosphere inside the Kremlin and President Putin’s head any NATO military strike on Russian soil or a Russian ship would almost certainly lead to escalation of the war, possibly beyond Ukraine.

Are there any alternatives? The answer to that question goes to the very heart of NATO’s core purpose and the very meaning of deterrence. Mention the words NATO deterrence to most thinking people and immediately nuclear deterrence comes to mind.  Here, Russia has NATO over a barrel. By repeatedly breaching the now defunct 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty Moscow has been able to illegally develop a whole family of tactical and intermediate-range nuclear missile systems.  These weapons sit somewhere between conventional military power and the world-destroying strategic nuclear systems typified by this week’s propaganda test of the new Sarmat (Satan 2) intercontinental ballistic-plus nuclear missile. On the face of it they afford Moscow more rungs on the escalation ladder than are available NATO. NATO deterrence is built on a slowly recapitalising conventional defence and the strategic nuclear systems of the US, UK and France. 

Restoring deterrence

In other words, there would appear to a hole in NATO deterrence that even the Russians could exploit. Or is there?  The concept of deterrence has become too focused on weapons and not enough on effects. Whatever happens in Ukraine there will be a revolution in warfare over the coming decade or so driven by American and Chinese technology. Whilst the headline-grabbers will be artificially-intelligent weapons and the swarms in which they will operate, the daily perma-war NATO is now fighting will be dominated by information and cyber warfare, both offensive and defensive, and their interaction with military future force.

Future NATO deterrence will thus be built on an effects-based ‘triad’ of deep, machine-led intelligence, offensive defence and defensive resilience, and advanced, hyper speed strike. Critical people and infrastructure protection/destruction will thus be as important as force-on-force engagement in what is already a form of total war.  THAT, is why the Kremlin and its cronies say they are already fighting World War Three. They are. Paradoxically, much of Russia’s self-evident operational incompetence in Ukraine has been caused by diverting limited resources to fund the spectacular at the expense of the militarily capable. It will not always be thus.

Therefore, rather than attack Russia using direct military action NATO could respond to any such attack on, say, Poland by causing the mass disruption of Russian infrastructures and Russian military communications which would clearly be vulnerable to such an attack. In other words, the Allies should respond by demonstrating to the Russian NATO is developing a new concept of deterrence and escalation as part of an effects continuum that stretches across the mosaic of hybrid, cyber and hyperwar.

People power

There is a caveat that is all too often ignored. NATO deterrence will only work if all of us are prepared to accept that no NATO act in our name can come without risk. As the Kremlin becomes more desperate in the face of its own appalling strategic folly the more likely it is to escalate the war to de-escalate the crisis in line with current Russian political and military doctrine. It is nonsense, but then again the entire past seven weeks has seen nothing if not an exercise in Russian nonsense. Even the use of a ‘demonstration’ nuclear strike by Moscow in Ukraine can no longer be completely ruled out.  The more desperate Moscow becomes for some kind of victory the greater the likelihood of an attack on NATO territory, particularly if the current offensive in the Donbas grounds to a bloody halt.

Historically severe crises of this sort tend to move inexorably to a tipping point between escalation and de-escalation. That is precisely what happened during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the war in Ukraine seems to be on a similar trajectory. At such points the aggressor needs to be convinced to de-escalate.  Therefore, President Putin must fully understand that any and all attacks on NATO territory will be met with a graduated and proportionate response.  

NATO deterrence also needs two other realities to be gripped. First, NATO leaders need to be clear that there is indeed a clear link between arming Ukraine and defending the Alliance and establish policy and strategy to that end. Second, and perhaps most important of all, for NATO deterrence to be credible we, the NATO citizens, also need to be strong and suppress the understandable temptation to seek ‘peace in our time’.  We must all now take a stand.  Yes, it is a scary prospect and I am sorry I feel compelled to write this, but that is precisely the situation that Putin has created for Russians, Ukrainians, the Allies, and the whole world. NATO must not and cannot back down.

Peace through strength!

Julian Lindley-French

 

Putin’s Dumb War of Choice 3.0

 “Ukraine was becoming an anti-Russian bridgehead where sprouts of nationalism and neo-Nazism were being cultivated. This new generation of Ukrainian nationalists are especially clashing with Russia. You see how Nazi ideology became a fact of life in Ukraine…we had no other choice…there is no doubt that we will achieve our goals”.

President Vladimir Putin, April 12^th, 2022

Long war, cold war

April 14^th, 2022. The war in Ukraine is going to be a long war followed by a new Cold War. Moscow is now adapting its short-term war aims to suit its available forces which is why the next campaign should be seen as a distinct war in what will become an iterative series of wars. The Western Allies must now decide what their war aims and establish policy and strategy to that end. NATO, a defensive alliance, must thus define a concept of winning. That is the lesson from the Second Russo-Ukraine War and the coming Third Russo-Ukraine War.

Putin won the First Russo-Ukraine War in 2014 when he successfully seized Crimea and much of the Donbas region. Putin was defeated in the Second Russo-Ukraine War and his attempt to seize Kyiv. He is now about to launch the Third Russo-Ukraine War in the Donbas Region. However, the ends, ways and means of both his Ukraine strategy, and his wider aim to roll back NATO enlargement, do not as yet add up. Therefore, the NATO Allies are faced with a choice. They can either seek to defeat the Russian Army now by actively supporting Ukraine to destroy the ‘reconstitution sites’ the Russians have set up, but that will take direct NATO military action.  Or, NATO can help Ukraine resist the coming Russian offensive by helping them to fight the Russian Army to a stalemate. The latter option will leave a lot of south and east Ukraine in Russian hands, but also buy some time for both the European Allies and Ukraine to reconstitute credible deterrence and thus forestall a Fourth Russo-Ukraine War in the future. There is another alternative; the Allies can allow the Ukrainians to be defeated, which would lay the ground for Putin at some point to launch the First Russo-NATO.

Russia’s fluid war aims

If Moscow was acting logically it would wait for the land to dry out and the reservists, foreign fighters and mercenaries they have mobilised in the wake of their defeat to be properly trained and equipped. Then Russian forces would be well-placed to do what they have historically done best, grind down smaller more agile enemies through the meat-grinding application of mass and attrition. If Moscow was acting logically it would not have started these wars in the first place. It would appear Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who is a fanatical supporter of the war, has more influence over Putin these days than his generals. And, if President Putin really does want to declare victory by May 9^th then he simply cannot wait that long. 

The stated aim now is to ‘protect’ the people of Donetsk and Luhansk against Ukrainian ‘Nazis’. The military-strategic aims would thus appear to be threefold. First, the encirclement and destruction of the Ukrainian forces in the Joint Force Operating Area (in a box on the map at the head of this article between Kharkiv, Poltava, Dnipro and Kramatorsk.  Second, to secure the axis Kharkiv, Izium, Donetsk. Third, secure the land bridge between Russia’s Zone of Occupation in the East and Crimea. Russia’s decision not to adopt general mobilisation would suggest that capturing Odesa and securing a land bridge to Transnistria and Moldova is no longer a Russian objective for this campaign season. Moscow’s objective of denying Ukraine all and any access to the Black Sea has been further dented by the destruction of the guided missile cruiser Moskva. 

Putin’s dumb war 2.0

In President Putin’s mind he is already fighting World War Three. That might seem a strange assertion given that despite fourteen years of modernisation the Russian Army seems only able to undertake limited manoeuvre operations en masse close to Russia’s borders using dumb air power and even dumber land power. Operational planning, tactics and logistics during Russia’s failed war 2.0 was appalling, the combat power of Russian spearhead formations unimpressive, and the casualties reflective of a poorly-trained, poorly-equipped and ill-disciplined force.  By using targeted, intelligent small unit actions on their own terrain, reinforced by portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, the Ukrainians conducted a superb mobile defence with which the pinned, clunking Russian formations simply could not cope. Critically, the Russians failed to destroy Ukrainian command centres, let alone decapitate the political state, and could not even gain air supremacy over Ukraine. Russian forces were also constantly surprised by Ukraine’s clever use of drones and its exploitation of tactical intelligence.

This profound failure begs several important questions. Why did Putin launch a military campaign in Ukraine when the land was so wet it was unpassable for all but the lightest of forces? Why did advanced airborne forces (VVD) have such poor force protection and why were they used in such a low-level dispersed infantry role? Where was the Russian Air Force? Above all, why did Russian commanders launch a multi-direction campaign ordered to seize ten Ukrainian districts when they must have known lacked the force, the command chain, intelligence and secure communications, or even doctrine to conduct such a complex deep joint operation? If the Russian force deployed during the first war had come up against NATO forces it would almost have certainly been totally destroyed by H plus 48.  

The Third Russo-Ukrainian War

The Third Russo-Ukrainian War is likely to be run by a Stavka that Marshals Zhukov and Konev would recognise, albeit with new operational staff, a more competent and less complicated plan operational plan, and with only a fraction of the available manpower of a World War Two Russian Army Front. Proval blitskriga revisited, albeit without the blitskriga?  Crucially, the Russians have now shortened their lines of supply and re-supply to prevent the chronic logistics failure that took place in the recent war.

The Americans believe the Russians still have about 80% of the combat power that was available to them on February 23^rd, just prior to the start of 2.0 when they had 190,000 personnel massed on Ukraine’s borders with Belarus and Russia. There are some 40% of Ukraine’s Regular Army in the Joint Force Operating Area facing Donetsk and Luhansk. Many of them are in fixed defensive positions that have been constructed since 2014 to contain Russian-backed separatists.  The Third Russo-Ukrainian War will seek to destroy the Ukrainian forces facing the Russia Army and will be very different to the assault on Kyiv, and in some respects could be even dumber. The Russians appear to have used up a lot of their precision guided munitions, whilst advanced systems, such as the Iskander short-range tactical missile and the Kinzhal hypersonic missile seem fewer in number than expected.  It seems the new Russian Army is still only capable of fighting in the old Russian manner.

The Russians will learn what they can from their many mistakes, but for the next three weeks at least their forces will be vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike as they concentrate for 3.0. The new Russian commander, General Alexandr Dvornikov, conducted a brutal campaign on civilians in Syria. Dvornikov is vulnerable in part because he still has six Combined Arms Army headquarters to integrate even as he builds up his forces for the coming offensive.   That is why he is trying to centralise all Russian forces under his command. There was evident friction between the commanders of the Western, Central and Southern Military Districts during 2.0. Dvornikov is also likely to offset the loss of land combat power and manoeuvre by massively increasing the use of Russian air, missile and artillery attacks on fixed Ukrainian positions. Whilst Russian airpower possibly lost some 10% of its capability during 2.0 it still has some 1000 combat-capable aircraft, including some 97 of the modernised 4^th/5^th generation hybrid Su-35S Flanker M, whilst event at the outset of the war Ukraine only had some 124 combat aircraft organised around 36 ageing MiG-29 Fulcrum.

Dvornikov will also pose the Ukrainians a profound dilemma. Do they seek to form a striking force and try to inflict a further humiliating defeat on the Russian Army, or do they try to recover territory. Given the correlation of forces the Ukrainians are unlikely to achieve both objectives. To secure either option the Ukrainians urgently need far more long-range missile and artillery capability. Thereafter, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will need training and equipping with far more advanced Western systems such as Leopard 2s (Germany?)

NATO v Russia

NATO must now answer a profound and pressing question: what must the Alliance do going forward if it is to successfully deter Putin? Putin has chosen a confrontational course of action with the Alliance. He is unlikely to stop because in his mind if he successfully establishes a new iron curtain along the line Kaliningrad, Belarus, Ukraine, Black Sea he will go down in Russian history as Vladimir the Great.

As for President Putin the First, Second and Third Russo-Ukraine Wars are all wars of his choosing. He did not have to start them. There is no reason to believe that this man will not continue to make bad choices for his country, for Europe, and for the wider world. Therefore, it is vital that the Alliance not only help Ukraine resist the coming onslaught, and in time regain its sovereignty, but also deter Putin from launching the most dangerous war of all – the First Russo-NATO War. The only way for NATO to deter him will be to convince Putin he cannot win and to do that the Alliance needs to plan and act…and now!

Julian Lindley-French