PARIS – NATO can not 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 urging it to return to the 1980 Cold War standoff, with tank units stationed on its borders to prevent an aggressive, unpredictable Russia from going overboard. From Ukraine. That would be wrong – and potentially a huge waste of Europe’s planned increases in defense spending. Certainly, territorial defense was not a top priority for NATO for the 25 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the occupation of Crimea by Russian President Vladimir Putin. His armor was drastically reduced and mostly left to rust. Instead, much of its attention policy and military effort has focused on so-called “off-site” crisis management, peacekeeping and training operations from the Western Balkans to Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. But this does not mean that the alliance should go to the opposite end. Ukraine’s mobile, dispersed forces — excessive but extremely effective — and the whole of society’s approach to defense are a clever way to stop and repel a carnal old-fashioned Russian attack. Tactical hit and run using portable US Javelin anti-tank weapons and shoulder-mounted Stinger anti-aircraft missiles – both technologies from the 1980s and 1990s – have softened Moscow’s armor and denied it air superiority. Similarly, when a cyber-attack blocked Internet connections used by the Ukrainian military, Kyiv was able to access terminals sent by Elon Musk’s Starlink within weeks, connecting drones to surveillance, command and control. real-time artillery. with a disastrous result. However, all this has not yet reassured the troubled Baltic nations, who see the devastation in Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure and fear they are next on Putin’s menu. At an emergency alliance summit on March 24, Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Callas led calls from the Eastern Allies for a massive, permanent NATO presence, calling for a full-fledged division in her country – something that would require at least five times as many are currently being developed in the Baltic State on a rotating basis. “NATO will defend every inch of its territory. We need reliable defense on land, in the air and at sea. “The current situation in our region is not sufficient in this regard,” Callas said after meeting with her Danish counterpart. “We must close the gap” The small NATO multinational battle teams sent to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 were designed to reassure these troubled, former communist allies and prevent Putin – not make a territorial defense. Their function was to serve as a travel wire, signaling that US, British, German, Canadian or French soldiers would be among the first to be killed in any Russian attack, internationalizing the conflict from the beginning and activating its mutual defense commitment. Article V of NATO. In doing so, the alliance complied with the letter of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Law, pledging to waive the “additional permanent deployment of significant combat forces” in new eastern Member States “in the current and foreseeable security environment”. But there is now widespread agreement in NATO that these promises are no longer valid, given the blatant breach of the agreement by Russia through its invasion of a sovereign European state. And since Russian warships entered Ukraine in February, NATO has doubled the size of its so-called Enhanced Forward Presence and announced plans to deploy similar multinational combat units in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. NATO now has 40,000 troops on the east side under direct command – 10 times more than the rule in peacetime – but many Eastern officials see this as just the beginning of a much larger concentration of armor, which they hope will be enshrined in the new Strategic Concept. due to be approved at the Madrid Summit in late June. There is a lot for NATO to do. It needs to upgrade its aerial policing in the Baltic and Black Sea regions to a fully integrated air defense, with additional radar and surface-to-air missiles, as well as fighter jets deploying closer to Russia. It should also conduct enhanced collective defense exercises to ensure that its “rapid crisis aid” strategy works in practice and that Allied forces are able to operate alongside standard equipment and communications. But all this is far from the “front defense” stance maintained by the alliance in Germany throughout the Cold War. NATO’s mission at the time was to stop Soviet tanks from pouring through the Fulda Gap, a strategic valley between the East German border and the West German city of Frankfurt – a major financial hub and headquarters of a major US air base. Today, some generals are spying on a similar strategic vulnerability in the so-called Suwalki Gap, a flat area of arable land on the Polish-Lithuanian border that separates the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad from the territory of Russian ally Belarus. Their concern is that Russian troops could quickly occupy and fortify the 65-kilometer corridor, cutting off the Baltic states from the rest of Europe. Therefore, the desire for a heavier, permanent force that will make the red line for Moscow even wider is understandable. But there is a danger of following the wrong path. In 21st century warfare, anti-platform maneuvering weapons are much more likely to benefit from expensive platforms, such as tanks, heavy bombers, or aircraft carriers. They are also several times cheaper and faster on the market. “In this age of semi-autonomous counter-platform warfare, the offensive to seize territory is more difficult than ever. . . “Killer robots are available in sufficient quantities to do such things,” said Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a senior fellow at the Friends of Europe think tank and a former U.S. infantry officer. “The infantry team of the future could be a human and nine robots, and their mortality could be equal to that of a 2020 battalion.” It does not make sense to prepare to see yesterday’s wars again. NATO needs to think smart, not heavy. He must be agile, light and fast in his territorial defense, aware of the situation in real time, not to build a static Maginot line on the east front. Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli general and defense minister, used to joke that “when the lion lies down with the lamb, I want to be the lion.” But Ukraine’s thorny defense shows that when the lion is with the hedgehog, it may be best to be the hedgehog.
