The Russian invasion of Ukraine shouldn’t have come as a shock to NATO.
Just a few years earlier in 2008, Moscow had invaded Georgia during the South Ossetia War. Over the past several years, Vladimir Putin has dramatically increased his nation’s military spending as well as raising the level of preparedness for war.
RUSSIA PREPARES FOR WAR AS NATO DISARMS
Even more ominous for Europe, just last December, despite the fact that NATO and its member nations had drastically reduced their military budgets, the Kremlin confirmed that it had moved ISKANDER tactical nuclear missiles to its European border.
It’s not just the equipment built and the $755 billion modernization program that should concern western analysts. Russia has engaged in extraordinary military exercises, such as Zapad-13, a joint effort with Belarus that involved up to 70,000 troops. The Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences described the effort:
“The use of Belorussian troops as an amphibious landing force from hoover craft, shows not just the level of integration between the Russian and Belorussian armed forces, it also should raise some concerns about Russian capacity to conduct landing operations. They should not just be linked to the number of dedicated amphibious units.
“The air defence forces trained to intercept approaching bombers with a fighter escort. Very clearly a task connected with a conventional war. The same goes for the amphibious landings supported by ship-to-shore bombardments.
“The use of UAV`s for target identification and damage assessment, both for the artillery and for ground attack aircraft, point at a quite high level of sophistication when it comes to fighting a modern war. The extensive use of well protected communication systems, both by Russian as well as Belorussian units, is also an import step in enhancing the ability to fight in an environment where electronic warfare is an important part.
“Live firing with long range systems as Smerch and especially Iskander, combined with the use of UAV´s, show an increased capability for “Deep Strike” with ground based systems. This should be disturbing for anyone contemplating to use fixed installations as harbours and airfields within the range of these systems. For example NATO, when considering how to reinforce the Baltic States in case of a crisis.
“The mobilization of reservists in the St. Petersburg area was of course a test if the system works, but it should also lead to some thoughts about the size of the Russian military. It is far too easy to fall in to the trap of just counting regular units, and also to assume that only state of the art units are useful in a future war. The latter depends entirely on who is the opponent.
“Altogether we see a rapidly increasing Russian capability to mount large scale, complex, military operations in its neighbourhood, coordinated with operations in other areas. It would be a mistake to see this just a problem for the Baltic States. It should have implications for most of Russia´s neighbours, and also for other parties interested in the security and stability in the Baltic Sea region.”
“Despite these clear signals that the Russian threat had returned, NATO nations, beset by financial troubles, continued to cling to the belief that the threat from its eastern border had permanently evaporated when the Soviet Union collapsed.”
In January, Russia joined with China for joint maneuvers in the Mediterranean. The exercise followed similar joint maneuvers between the two nations in the Sea of Japan.
US MILITARY REDUCTIONS ARE A KEY PROBLEM
As the major power within the NATO framework, the United States has set a poor example of countering Moscow’s new militaristic stance. A 2013 Heritage study noted:
“When President Obama took office, the armed services of the United States had already reached a fragile state. The Navy had shrunk to its smallest size sincebefore World War I; the Air Force was smaller, and its aircraft older, than at any time since the inception of the service. The Army was stressed by years of war; according to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, it had been underfunded before the invasion of Iraq and was desperately in need of resources to replace its capital inventory.
“Since the President took office, the government has cut $1.3 trillion from defense budgets over the next ten years. The last such reduction was embodied in sequestration. At the time sequestration was passed, the top leaders of the military, and of both parties (the very people who enacted sequestration), warned that it would have a devastating effect on America’s military.
“And so it has. The defense sequester was the worst possible thing to do to the military, at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. Coming on the heels of the reductions from 2009-2011, it has resulted in large cuts to the Pentagon accounts that support day-to-day readiness. The Navy is routinely cancelling deployments. Earlier this spring, the Air Force grounded one-third of its fighters and bombers. The Army has curtailed training for 80 percent of the force. Our strategic arsenal-the final line of national self-defense-is old, shrinking, and largely untested. All this is happening at a time when the recognized threats to America-from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the inaptly named “Arab Spring,” and a resurgent and spreading al-Qaeda-are manifestly rising.”
Indications such as the largely unreported U.S. withdrawal of all of its tanks from Europe sent a crucially wrong message to NATO nations that Washington was unconcerned about threats from Moscow.
EUROPEAN MILITARIES BECOMING TOO WEAK TO FIGHT
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While Sweden (which is considering joining NATO) and Poland have increased their defense budgets, the rest of the alliance adopted drastic cuts since the fall of the USSR.
The 2012 Brookings analysis emphasized:
“The majority of middle-sized EU countries have introduced military spending cuts of 10 to 15 percent on average. And several of the smaller EU member states have reduced their defense spending by more than 20 percent, leading to the loss of entire military capabilities.
“According to Andrew Dorman, although the United Kingdom has officially cut its defense budget by 7.5 percent over four years, in reality the reduction is nearly 25 percent. As a result, amongst its significant equipment cuts, Britain is giving up the ability to fly planes off aircraft carriers for a decade…
“the German government is planning numerous cuts within its military arsenal. These include reselling 13 A400M transport aircraft, even though Germany is likely to have to pay significant indemnities to its partners in the A400M program.
“France is the only big European country which has so far largely shielded its defense budget from the financial crisis… France has so far avoided cancelling any large acquisitions programs…”
The growing inability of NATO to engage in effective military action was demonstrated in the action to depose Muammar Quadafi. In the Libyan action, European nations had great difficulty in mounting operations against a relatively weak and unsophisticated foe.
It is not just on the land mass of the European continent, with smaller armies and air forces, that NATO has become significantly less potent. At sea, the diminishment of NATO countries navies, including the reduction of the worldwide American fleet from 600 ships to only 284, presents a key challenge, as does the rise of significant new maritime threats. An American Enterprise Institute study noted:
“China’s naval renaissance impacts NATO nations’ force-structure decisions. As the United States turns more of its interest to the Pacific, baseline security requirements in the Mediterranean will become more important to Europe’s NATO navies, perhaps creating greater incentive to resource them. Additionally, both France and the United Kingdom see themselves as global nations with global interests that extend far into the Pacific. If these nations perceive China’s rise as threatening these interests, they will likely find their navies too small to provide any real impact, given the great distances involved and the paucity of ships to maintain constant presence. There is a real tension between global presence and a “balanced fleet,” one that currently only the United States is able to resolve, and barely that.”
NATO SOUGHT TO REASSURE RUSSIA
NATO has been particularly sensitive to Moscow’s perspective during the period following the fall of the Soviet Union, even in the aftermath of the Georgian and Ukrainian invasions. It refrained from establishing a significant presence within the territory of its eastern members, so much so that those nations have requested far more protection. It’s patrols in that area have been minimal.
The European Voice publication noted Poland’s reaction to this: “As the United States winds down its military presence in Europe, NATO is getting weaker, not stronger. Poland is worried about this. It has started a big military modernisation, based on the (unstated) assumption that it may have to fight alone.”
A Lexington Institute study concluded in February noted:
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is struggling to transition from a deployed Alliance focused on conducting significant counterinsurgency
operations, to a responsive Alliance prepared to react to any number of demanding and unpredictable contingencies…Yet the ability of the Alliance to meet current obligations as well as future operational and technological requirements is open to serious doubts. For more than two decades, NATO spending on defense has declined to levels today that are perilously close to disarmament. Senior U.S. officials have repeatedly warned NATO that its failure to invest adequately and appropriately in defense places the future of the Alliance at risk…
“[Europe] is militarily weaker and more divided on issues of security and the use of force than it has been since the end of World War Two. both the spectrum of potential crises NATO must face and their geographic diversity continue to increase. The U.S military draw down and the pivot to Asia will stress Washington’s ability to commit forces to NATO. Not only is NATO defense spending continuing to decline and the Alliance’s force structures continuing to shrink but decisions regarding the character of residual forces and the allocation of remaining defense resources are skewed in ways that make it more difficult to deploy effective military power, particularly for expeditionary activities of significant scale. NATO has had to reduce the size of its core crisis response capability, the NATO Response Force (NRF). The lack of coordination among national ministries of defense on force structure changes and modernization programs makes it difficult to ensure adequate capabilities in some areas while there are clear surfeits in others. Non-U.S. NATO continues to lag in its investments in critical enablers for modern, knowledge-intensive power projection military operations.”
CONCLUSION
While Russia invests heavily in military hardware, expands the power of its strategic and tactical forces on land, sea, and in the air, gains a vastly powerful new ally in China, and engages in aggressive actions, NATO remains underfunded with deteriorating capabilities and, under the Obama Administration, increasingly questionable support from the United States.
It is a blueprint tailor-made to invite aggression.