NATO cannot afford to learn the wrong lesson from the war in Ukraine.
The Western military alliance is facing unprecedented pressure from its eastern members, who are demanding it return to a 1980s-style Cold War approach and deploy tank divisions on its borders to deter an aggressive, unpredictable Russia from moving beyond Ukraine.
That would be a mistake - and potentially a colossal waste of planned European increases in defense spending.
It is clear that territorial defense was not a top priority for NATO during the 25 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russian President Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea; the armored forces of the Alliance were drastically reduced and mostly left to rust. Instead, much of the political attention and military effort has focused on crisis management "outside" the Alliance's peacekeeping and training operations, from the Western Balkans to Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.
However, this does not mean that the Alliance should go to the other extreme.
Ukraine's mobile, dispersed forces - outnumbered, though highly effective - and a whole-of-society approach to defense are a smart way to stop and repel a heavy-handed and old-fashioned Russian offensive. Their hit-and-run tactics, using the US's man-portable Javelin anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles - both technologies of the 1980s and 1990s - penetrated Moscow's armor and denied it air superiority.
Likewise, when a cyberattack knocked out Internet links used by the Ukrainian military, within weeks Kiev was able to switch to Elon Musk's Starlink terminals, connecting surveillance, command and control drones and anti-tank artillery in real time with devastating effect.
However, all this still did not convince the anxious Baltic states, which are watching the destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure and fear that they are next on Putin's menu.
At the alliance's emergency summit on March 24, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kalas led eastern members' pleas for a massive, permanent NATO presence, calling for a full combat-ready division to be stationed in her country - five times the number of allied forces currently deployed in that Baltic country on a rotating basis.
Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli general and defense minister, jokingly used to say "when a lion lies down with a lamb, I want to be a lion." However, Ukraine's prickly defense shows that when a lion lies down with a hedgehog, it may be better to be the hedgehog.
"NATO will defend every inch of its territory. We need a credible defense on land, in the air and at sea. The current situation in our region is not favorable in that sense", said Kalas after the meeting with her Danish colleague. “We have to fill the gap”.
Small multinational NATO battlegroups were sent to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 with the aim of reassuring these jittery, former communist allies and deterring Putin — not conducting territorial defense. Their function was to serve as a signal wire, indicating that American, British, German, Canadian or French soldiers would be among the first to die in the event of a Russian attack, which would make the conflict international from the start and activate NATO Article 5 on mutual defense.
In this way, the Alliance remained consistent with the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, in which it pledged to renounce "additional permanent stationing of significant combat forces" in the new Eastern member states "in the current and foreseeable security environment."
However, there is now a general agreement within NATO that those promises are no longer valid, bearing in mind that Russia has openly violated the agreement by invading a sovereign European state. Since Russian tanks entered Ukraine in February, NATO has doubled its so-called "enhanced forward presence" and announced plans to position similar combat-ready multinational units in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
NATO now has 40 troops on its eastern perimeter under direct command - ten times more than in peacetime - but many eastern officials see this as just the beginning of a much larger military build-up, which they hope will be included in the new Strategic Concept that should be adopted at the summit in Madrid at the end of June.
There is much that NATO needs to do.
It needs to upgrade air controls in the Baltic and Black Sea regions to a fully integrated air defense, with additional radars and surface-to-air missiles, as well as fighter jets deployed closer to Russia. It should also conduct increased collective defense exercises to ensure that its "rapid reinforcement in a crisis" strategy works in practice and that allied forces are able to operate together with standard equipment and communications.
But all this is still a far cry from the "forward defense" posture that the Alliance had in Germany during the Cold War. NATO's mission at the time was to stop Soviet tanks from crossing the Fulda Gap, a strategic valley between the East German border and Frankfurt, West Germany - a major financial center and home to a US air base.
Today, some generals see a similar strategic vulnerability in the so-called Suvalki Gap, an area on the Polish-Lithuanian border that separates the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad from the territory of Russian ally Belarus. They fear that Russian troops could quickly seize this 65-kilometer corridor, cutting off the Baltic states from the rest of Europe.
Therefore, the desire for a stronger, permanent force that would make the red line for Moscow even wider is understandable. But therein lies the danger of going down the wrong path.
In 21st century warfare, maneuverable anti-platform weapons are more likely to defeat expensive platforms, such as tanks, heavy bombers or aircraft carriers. They are also many times cheaper and faster to acquire.
"In this era of semi-automated counter-platform warfare, the attack to seize territory is more difficult than it has ever been ... until robots are available in sufficient quantities to do such things," said Chris Kremidas Courtney, a former US Army officer and partner in the Friends organization. of Europe". "The infantry squad of the future may consist of one man and nine robots, and their lethality may be in the range of a tank company".
There is no use in preparing to fight yesterday's wars. NATO needs to think smart, not hard. It should be nimble, light and fast in its territorial defense, aware of the situation in real time, and not build a static Maginot line on the eastern front.
Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli general and defense minister, jokingly used to say "when a lion lies down with a lamb, I want to be a lion." However, Ukraine's prickly defense shows that when a lion lies down with a hedgehog, it may be better to be the hedgehog.
Translated by: N. Bogetić
politico.eu
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