By Christopher Trzaska
On February 24, 2022, the European security landscape was changed forever by Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Previously, NATO focused most of its deterrence efforts around preventing a Ukraine-style Russian assault on an eastern NATO member state. While Ukraine is not a NATO member and likely won't be for some time, the invasion has provided the opportunity for NATO to learn some very important lessons as it prepares to confront a wounded but dangerous Russia. If NATO is to be prepared for the next Russian war of aggression, it must focus on two key areas: intelligence gathering and a recognition that many of the promises and frameworks of the past may no longer be relevant. Intelligence capabilities must be improved, especially among key European member states, to ensure NATO is clear-eyed about the threats Russia can realistically pose. At a policy level, NATO should abandon some of the restraints it has held itself to since the 1990s, specifically with regard to the positioning of forces and the pace and direction of enlargement.
While accurately predicting the time and central objectives of the invasion, NATO and the West seriously misjudged the actual strength of the Russian Armed Forces, which before the war were thought of as one of the best in the world. What the conduct of this invasion revealed is that a significant portion of the West’s conceptualizations of Russian capabilities were almost entirely off base. Russian logistic capabilities, in particular, proved to be anemic at best, with Russian armor assets stopping dead in their tracks after running out of fuel, leaving them sitting ducks for the miraculously operable Ukrainian Air Force. Most Western intelligence agencies expected Russian forces to quickly overwhelm most of Ukraine’s conventional troops, forcing the defenders into a desperate and extended war of attrition. The West was caught off guard both by the level of professionalism of the Ukrainian forces they spent eight years training and by the relative lack of professionalism exhibited by the Russian forces, who seemed to be completely unprepared to fight a modern multidomain war.
While this intelligence failure might be excused considering that the West overestimated Russian capabilities, it comes on the heels of catastrophic intelligence failures over the last several years. Even in Ukraine, Western governments like France and Germany dramatically underestimated the likelihood of a full-scale invasion to the point where spy chiefs were being evacuated from Kyiv in the face of Russian missile fire.
If NATO is to have an effective deterrence strategy, it needs to know what types of threats it is to be reasonably expected to deter. NATO wargames prior to the invasion found that Russian assaults on the Baltics took only 60 hours to achieve their main objectives. Those wargames and others like them are used to inform everything from where to position forces to how many troops are required to repel a Russian assault. If decisions are made based on faulty intelligence, this can lead to dangerous miscalculations that raise the odds of accidental conflict. Changes must be made in the spy agencies of key NATO member states like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to ensure that they are not as reliant on the United States for accurate information about an impending war in their own backyard.
Beyond intelligence, another area in which NATO can improve its deterrence posture is by modernizing the political assumptions and commitments that underpin key decisions. In many ways, NATO is playing by the rules of a game that has long since ended. NATO must recognize that Russia no longer sees itself as bound by the commitments it made in the 1990s. To Vladimir Putin, such agreements were temporary measures forced on Russia at a time of weakness, and it is past time to throw them into the bin. Whether it is invading Ukraine in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, threatening Finland and Sweden over their accession plans in violation of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, or brazenly breaking nuclear arms reduction treaties on a consistent basis, it is clear that Vladimir Putin no longer feels bound to the agreements his predecessors sign on to.
However, NATO has been painfully slow in recognizing this new world. It has been reluctant to deploy permanent conventional forces to former Soviet countries in order not to fall afoul of the Founding Act. This is even as members like Poland and the Baltic states have been clamoring for permanently stationed forces for many years. It is only recently that the U.S. committed to stationing permanent forces in Poland, a delayed yet important step in re-establishing a credible Eastern deterrence posture. However, no other NATO member state has announced any plans to station forces in the East, leaving NATO again looking like a vassal for U.S. power and not a cohesive block of 30 allies working for mutual benefit.
Much of NATO’s recent post-Ukraine invasion activity has focused on preventing a similar assault on a NATO state. Forces poured into Poland and other frontline member states, standing guard in case Russia attempted to widen its attack. While significant, such forces are largely a demonstration of resolve instead of a tactical necessity. Russia is in absolutely no position to launch an attack on a NATO member state. After struggling for six months with little progress against one of the poorest countries in Europe, the chances of a conventional Russian attack on a NATO member are functionally zero. That does not mean that Russia poses no threat but instead means that the threat it does pose has shifted. NATO must be prepared to match that shift.
With its forces depleted, its economy in ruin, and its reputation in tatters, Russia has turned to more unconventional methods to undermine the West. While Russia is no stranger to hybrid warfare, it no longer has the same level of military power to back up its hybrid threats. Such a strong military force is necessary to the success of Russia’s hybrid conflicts as it relies on the threat of use of force wildly disproportionate to the underlying conflict to get its way. The West largely backed off in the face of Russian aggression in 2008, 2014, and 2016 as they feared Putin might unleash the full might of the Russian military in response to Western counteractivity. No Western leader was willing to risk war with Russia over Georgia, Crimea, or election meddling. With Russia’s military gutted and its surviving forces fighting a brutal game of inches in Donetsk, Putin can no longer use the threat of disproportionate escalation to bully the West into backing down.
This means Putin will be forced to double down on low-cost, low-risk efforts to distract the West with messy yet potentially very costly brush fires. NATO must be prepared to counter the information war, using American efforts to expose Russian disinformation and get ahead of key narratives in the leadup to the War in Ukraine as a model. Vladimir Putin is working with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Bosnian Serb Presidency member Milorad Dodik to foster secessionist sentiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina which could lead to a reopening of one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent European history. Vladimir Putin is also stirring tensions in Moldova, with thinly veiled threats of invasion and stoking of political tensions threatening to plunge the currently neutral country into chaos. Beyond the Balkans, Putin continues to sow chaos in the West, backing politicians that undermine the global order and seek to turn the West inward. In order to confront Putin’s threatening hybrid and information warfare efforts, NATO must be willing to abandon long-standing legal and political commitments surrounding force posture, enlargement, and burden sharing.
NATO should continue to expand Eastward into additional former Soviet states like Georgia and Ukraine, even at the expense of antagonizing Russia. It should make accession a realistic and viable option for former Soviet states worried they are next in the Kremlin’s crosshairs. Hesitancy towards enlargement is understandable, especially when considering granting membership to countries currently dealing with a Russian occupation of their sovereign territory. However, NATO cannot continue to allow Russia to use the threat of force as a way to forestall a nation’s inherent right to choose an alliance. A right Russia itself recognized in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.
By making it clear that NATO is willing to continue with enlargement even in the face of aggression, it can demonstrate to Russia and to countries worried about future Russian mischief that NATO is willing to act on the values and guarantees it professes. The case of Sweden and Finland’s accession is a shining example of the utility of enlargement both as a political tool as well as a tactical one. By welcoming Finland and Sweden into the alliance, even in the face of Turkish frustrations, NATO demonstrated it is unwilling to be deterred in the face of threats (both verbal and physical) from Russia. Membership in NATO is the single most important factor in determining how likely a country is to face kinetic threats from Russia. Consequently, NATO should end the debate around Ukrainian and Georgian membership and lay out exactly the path that Ukraine and Georgia must take in order to join the alliance.
A lot has changed in the European security arena in the past eight months. Previous efforts at deterrence that focused primarily on deterring conventional attacks on member states have become paradoxically outdated with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The conventional conflict between Western and Russian forces is exceedingly unlikely, meaning that NATO must boost its intelligence capacity to ensure its forces and assets are able to respond to any threat to a member state, whether that threat comes from the barrel of a Russian-backed separatists' gun or the airwaves of a phony propaganda outfit. To respond to these rapidly diversifying threats, NATO must adapt many strategies and assumptions it has used to underpin decision-making in the last 30 years. By fully embracing enlargement and abandoning the pretext of engaging with Russia as anything other than an adversary, NATO can successfully deter and defeat future Russian threats to the safety, security, and democratic way of life that form the foundations of the world’s most successful military alliance.
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