When the last US Abrams battle tanks left Germany in 2013, it marked the end of a 69-year presence, and told of a western military alliance untroubled by potential problems on Europe’s borders. Just a few years later American armour is again fanning out across the continent’s east with a mission not just to show strength to an emboldened Russia, but to test whether the mundane matter of logistics might hobble Nato’s response to any provocative action.
The scores of US fighting vehicles that in September rolled on to the docks in Gdansk in Poland were the latest to join an urgent effort to test the obstacles to rapid Nato deployment in Europe.
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea tops a list of security worries that have brought the “peace dividend” era after the fall of the Berlin Wall to an abrupt end. General Robert Neller, the US marine corps commandant, warned US troops stationed in Norway late last month that he felt “there’s a war coming”. His spokesperson later said the general did not believe a battle to be imminent, but was stressing the need “to be ready for the full spectrum of conflict”.
Just a week earlier, a senior Russian official had accused Nato of forcing Moscow against its will into “military competition in the centre of Europe”.
“After the wall came down . . . it didn’t even occur to anybody that we would have to be moving across eastern Europe in any kind of military formation,” says General Ben Hodges, until recently commander of the US Army Europe. “We all thought Russia was going to be our partner. Everybody started downsizing their military as fast as they could.”
Now, a senior Nato official says the alliance is “looking at all those things we forgot how to do”. He admits the pact — or at least some of its members — could have been quicker to heed warnings from events such as a wide-ranging cyber attack in Estonia in 2007 and the brief Russia-Georgia war in 2008. “All of the indicators were there,” he says. “We took our eye off the ball.”
Others in Nato dispute that it has been too slow to adjust to big changes in the international security environment. But officials in both the alliance’s sprawling Brussels headquarters and the capitals of its 29 member states agree that there is an urgent need to sharpen operations in Europe. Both Nato and the EU have launched multi-pronged initiatives to address logistics concerns, from easing transport bottlenecks to reforming time-consuming border customs procedures.
The military overhaul in Europe is providing a new test of Nato’s capacity for reinvention, nearly 70 years after it was founded. The alliance is now trying to demonstrate its ability to protect a post-cold war frontier that stretches from the Arctic Circle to northern Syria.
The challenges facing Nato range from the capabilities of cash-strapped European militaries, to the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration and the intentions of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Nato also faces questions about whether its scaled-up territorial security is proportionate — or risks provoking the very kind of conflict it is supposed to prevent.
“Nato certainly doesn’t want a new cold war, [but] the world has changed and therefore Nato has to change,” says Jens Stoltenberg, the pact’s secretary-general, who took over less than a year after the Crimea conflict began. “For the first time in our history, we need to do crisis management beyond our borders and at the same time step up . . . our efforts for collective defence in Europe.”
The process has intensified since Mr Trump took office. The US leader shocked Nato allies in May when he failed to reiterate American support for the pact’s Article 5 provision, under which members commit to each other’s mutual defence. Since then, he and other US officials have made more reassuring statements but he has also urged, even more directly than previous US administrations, European members to spend more on defence. He claimed in November that this pressure had yielded results: “Billions and billions of dollars are pouring in,” he said. “Nato, believe me, is very happy with Donald Trump and what I did.”
European countries, which make up the overwhelming majority of Nato members, have signalled that they are taking common security more seriously. All but three of the EU’s 28 member states last month launched the so-called Permanent Structured Cooperation (Pesco) to boost defence co-operation.
A Dutch-led initiative to improve military mobility around Europe, looking at obstacles from red tape to inadequate infrastructure, has been approved under Pesco. It is intended to dovetail with a report on the same subject due from the EU’s European Defence Agency in the spring. Halbe Zijlstra, Dutch foreign minister, has said the military mobility work “should enable the EU to better ensure our own security”.
The flurry of activity reflects the scale of the rethink on the defence of Europe since the Crimea conflict began. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Nato redirected its operations into international conflicts such as Afghanistan and more recently Libya. US army personnel in Europe fell to just a tenth of its postwar peak of about 300,000, as Washington’s focus shifted to Afghanistan, Iraq and the rise of China.
Now the Nato alliance has set up what it styles as a deterrent air, land and sea presence in its eastern member states.
There is a “tripwire” first line of defence of about 4,500 Nato troops in forward bases in Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Since 2015, a US armoured brigade of about 3,300 personnel has been based on rotation in Europe.
The relatively small size of the alliance’s eastern resources inevitably leads to the question of what would happen if Russia, or another power, decided to test Nato’s strength. Russian troops could be on the outskirts of Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, within 60 hours of an attack starting, a study by the Rand Corporation claimed in 2016. Nato says a “spearhead” reinforcement contingent of 5,000 troops could start deploying anywhere in Europe “within days”. This year the spearhead force will be led by Italy, whose capital Rome is more than 2,000km from Tallinn.
The logistical problems run deeper than distance. In central and eastern Europe, where many countries were either in the Soviet Union or part of its Warsaw Pact, infrastructure is sometimes sparse or dilapidated. Bridges, tunnels, roads, railways and ports in western Europe have not been built in the past 25 years to carry large numbers of heavy US military vehicles. “They are no longer building bridges in Europe with a 70-tonne capacity capable of supporting the weight of an Abrams tank,” says Douglas Lute, former US permanent representative to Nato.
The quantity and variety of glitches is intimidating: a six-hour delay to shipments crossing between Poland and Lithuania due to a change in rail gauge; the obstacles military vehicles face clearing the many Polish railway stations that have only one siding (Warsaw says most stations have more than one); the limitations of Bremerhaven, a German North Sea port, where access is via a single road gate that allows only a total of 1,500 vehicles per day in and out.
The investment the EU and Nato make in improving and reviving infrastructure will ultimately be a “political decision”, says Michael Linick, a contributor to the Rand report. “The more aggressive their posture towards Russia, the more necessary this is.”
Gen Hodges says the European Reassurance Initiative — a US fund set up after the Crimea operation and worth $3.4bn in 2017 — has already financed improvements to railheads so tanks can be unloaded more quickly. Other priorities should include transporters for heavy equipment and fuel storage facilities. “This is stuff that we could put money into immediately,” he adds.
Administrative constraints add a further layer to the deployment challenge. Border checks can be suspended to allow swift movement in the event of a crisis. But in the absence of such a red alert, commanders have to observe domestic rules such as German laws that ban heavy vehicles from the roads at certain times. Nato says it has made a priority of cutting border processing times for troops and materiel from as much as three weeks in some member states to a target of five days.
Western military planners are also under pressure to solve often longstanding problems of incompatible equipment, from radios to fuel nozzles.
Europe’s 28 militaries are themselves an unruly collection of vehicles and weapons. According to a report in October by the Nato parliamentary assembly, which brings together legislators from member countries, the continent has 20 types of fighter jet, compared with six from the US; 29 varieties of destroyer and frigate, compared with just four for the US; and 17 versions of main battle tanks, compared with one produced by its largest member. “Clearly in Europe we have huge waste,” says one EU diplomat. “Everybody has their own defence industry — and no one wants to give theirs up.”
Money shortages also threaten Nato ambitions — even though the alliance’s members spent an estimated $946bn on defence last year. In 2016, only four of the European members — the UK, Poland, Estonia and Greece — met an alliance target to spend the equivalent of 2 per cent of gross domestic product on their militaries. They are expected to be joined by Romania this year, while Latvia and Lithuania have also committed to reaching the goal. EU funds aimed at projects in the union’s poorer regions and worth €63.4bn for the 2014 to 2020 period are being eyed as a potential source of infrastructure finance.
Many analysts still rate a direct Russian attack on a member state unlikely, arguing that a greater threat is posed by cyber or hybrid warfare — a blend of the conventional and the digital. But European officials insist Moscow has been probing militarily: Russian aircraft movements in or near Baltic state airspace have risen, while naval activity is at its highest level since the cold war. Russian submarines have been deployed in areas such as the Black Sea, eastern Mediterranean and around crucial undersea transatlantic communications cables, Nato officials say.
Moscow has in turn branded Nato’s build-up, including the deployment of missile defence systems in Europe, as an aggression aimed at encircling Russia. Alexander Grushko, the country’s ambassador to Nato, condemned last month what he calls the alliance’s “genetic code [which] manifests itself in search for a ‘big enemy’ in the east against which it’s necessary to defend”.
In September, when Moscow held its Zapad military exercise on Russia’s western edge, extra Nato member state soldiers, ships and aircraft spread out around the Baltic territories. It was a small taste of the much larger deployment task for which Nato strategists and EU countries have begun to prepare.
Nato’s new priorities are in one sense the long-delayed fallout from its decision to expand to Russia’s borders by taking in former eastern bloc countries as members after 1999. That growth has placed expensive responsibilities and demands on the alliance’s European members. The question now is whether a continent already facing growing tensions from rising populism to Brexit is ready to shift to a higher military alert.
“Nobody really expected Crimea to happen, but it did,” says another European diplomat. “Now you look and you see: there could be a million things that impede the quick movement of armed forces we need.”
Flash points: The key places in Nato’s rivalry with Russia
The Suwalki gap The 65-mile border between Poland and Lithuania, the EU’s only land connection with the Baltic states, is seen as particularly vulnerable. Serviced by a single railway line, it is squeezed between the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus, historically a Russian ally.
Tapa army base A Nato battle group, the bulk of it more than 800 British servicemen and women, is headquartered at this alliance forward position in Estonia. The deployment is one of several made by the pact across the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Tartus naval facility This operation on the coast of conflict-racked Syria gives Russia an important strategic foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. Moscow has provided crucial support to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus in the country’s near seven-year civil war. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin last week signed off on an agreement to turn the Tartus facility into a fully-fledged naval base, according to Russia Today.
Sevastopol naval base The Crimean port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, is vital to Moscow’s naval power in the Mediterranean and beyond. Moscow followed up its 2014 annexation of Crimea by renouncing the contracts with Ukraine that limited Russian presence at the Sevastopol facility. Russia has lately deployed six new Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines in the Black Sea and Mediterranean, according to Nato officials.
Keflavik air base The Icelandic facility’s gradual reawakening is a sign of how the security environment in Europe has changed. A permanently stationed US Air Force contingent left more than a decade ago as part of wider post-cold war drawdown. But the base’s infrastructure still works and has been used in Nato’s enhanced air surveillance operations since Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea.
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