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Conventional Deterrence and Landpower in Northeastern Europe
Abstract
The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) face daunting challenges in the Baltic region. Russia is behaving aggressively. Its military is more capable than it has been at any point since the end of the Cold War. More importantly, Russia is finding creative ways to subvert the status quo and to sow discord without triggering Article 5 of NATO, which declares that an attack against one member is an attack against all.
These problems are formidable, but we have reason to be optimistic. Far from shattering NATO’s cohesion and undermining its resolve, Russian aggression has reinvigorated the alliance. Nor is Russia an unstoppable adversary. It has many weaknesses. Indeed, Russian fears over those vulnerabilities might be driving its aggressive foreign policy. Even if this is not the case and Russia is indeed a relentless predator, it is nevertheless a vulnerable one.
The United States and its NATO allies can take advantage of these vulnerabilities. After assessing Russian intentions, capabilities, and limitation, this monograph recommends a hedging strategy to improve early detection capabilities, enhance deterrence in unprovocative ways, and improve regional defenses against a hybrid threat. Achieving these goals should help the United States deter Russia and reassure regional allies more effectively while managing our own worst fears.
... Even Poland's formidable ground forces will be hard pressed to delay -let alone stop -the three armies that Russia can draw upon from its Western Military District alone. 19 Second, US and NATO will face an uphill fight to reinforce and resupply BG POL. Russia will likely use its long-range precision weapons to interdict attempts to resupply and reinforce BG POL. ...
... For example, operating in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) or counter unmanned aerial systems (UAS) training was absent, not because we were not cognisant of the threat but because we did not have any TTPs to train to, other than micro-tactical actions (camouflage and concealment, etc.). 19 The pre-deployment training experience could thus be improved by relocating a period of the training -not least the MST phase -from Warminster, UK, to the Grafenwoehr Training Area, Bavaria, Germany. As the largest NATO training facility in Europe -which the UK Army already uses -it offers a closer theatre-specific training experience for UK troops deploying to Estonia. ...
... Ensuring a greater NATO presence has been a priority though, so Latvia invests heavily in HNS despite the opportunity costs. 19 The public visibility of the eFP battlegroup has also been a concern. 20 Public opinion in Latvia has been mostly favourable towards the presence of NATO troops, although Latvians and Russian-speakers are divided on most questions related to national security. ...
... Even Poland's formidable ground forces will be hard pressed to delay -let alone stop -the three armies that Russia can draw upon from its Western Military District alone. 19 Second, US and NATO will face an uphill fight to reinforce and resupply BG POL. Russia will likely use its long-range precision weapons to interdict attempts to resupply and reinforce BG POL. ...
... For example, operating in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) or counter unmanned aerial systems (UAS) training was absent, not because we were not cognisant of the threat but because we did not have any TTPs to train to, other than micro-tactical actions (camouflage and concealment, etc.). 19 The pre-deployment training experience could thus be improved by relocating a period of the training -not least the MST phase -from Warminster, UK, to the Grafenwoehr Training Area, Bavaria, Germany. As the largest NATO training facility in Europe -which the UK Army already uses -it offers a closer theatre-specific training experience for UK troops deploying to Estonia. ...
... Ensuring a greater NATO presence has been a priority though, so Latvia invests heavily in HNS despite the opportunity costs. 19 The public visibility of the eFP battlegroup has also been a concern. 20 Public opinion in Latvia has been mostly favourable towards the presence of NATO troops, although Latvians and Russian-speakers are divided on most questions related to national security. ...
... Was the Russian leadership revisionist and driven by a desire to expand territorial control westwards to create a larger geographical buffer between Russia and NATO? Or was the Kremlin status quo-oriented, driven by fear of further NATO expansion and trying to prevent its geographical buffer from becoming ever smaller (Götz, 2016;Lanoszka and Hunzeker, 2019)? If Russia wanted to expand its territory to the west, the military threat to NATO was high -NATO weakness invited aggression. ...
... The procedure is demonstrated in Tables 1 and 2 below, where two competing theories of threat and success and their policy recommendations are presented. They were chosen because they dominated the NATO debate about how to deter a Russian attack in the Baltic region (for an overview of the debate, see Lanoszka and Hunzeker, 2019). Table 1 demonstrates how causal theory can be used to make relevant threat (or opportunity) assessments (theories of opportunity/threat) and validate them to ensure that the best threat/ opportunity assessment is used as the basis for the subsequent formulation of ends, ways and means (see Table 2). ...
The common assumptions-ends-ways-means-risk (AEWMR) military strategy model instructs its users to make reasonable assumptions, balance ends, ways and means, and control for risks. But it does not offer much practical guidance on how this should be done, or how to choose between relevant balanced strategies. To address this problem, recent scholarship has proposed the concept of theory of success as an analytical tool to enhance the ability of strategists to assess, formulate, and validate military strategies. This article seeks to take this body of scholarship to the next level by operationalizing the theory of success concept into a simple easy-to-use practical guide that helps its users to identify the assumptions and causal hypotheses underpinning any military strategy, and to validate it logically and empirically. The article is based on the assumption that greater analytical clarity and rigour is a prerequisite for better military strategy. It expects conceptually clear, logically consistent and empirically validated military strategies to stand a better chance of success than vague, inconsistent, and poorly validated ones. Use of the analytical tool proposed here will of course not guarantee successful outcomes. Politics, biases and flawed intelligence may still result in the adoption of flawed assumptions and formulation of ill-suited strategies. Military strategy from may also continue to fail in the execution phase as a result of clever enemy responses and unforeseen developments.
... Indeed, there are a plethora of reports and wargames on how to protect the Baltic states and the Suwałki Gap in particular, which is on the border of Poland and Lithuania (Petersen et al. 2018;Shlapak and Johnson 2016). But although it is easy to group Poland and the Baltic states together, given the acute threat from Russia that they face, their defense capabilities are vastly different (Lanoszka and Hunzeker 2019). The Baltic states have smaller economies and populations, resulting in modest defense budgets and armed forces with limited size and equipment. ...
In the 1990s and 2000s, as NATO enlargement became a reality, scholars commented on the socializing influence of NATO, predicting a transformation of security identities. Was NATO successful in institutionalizing self-restraint and cooperative security among its new members and partners? We contend that it was successful so long as threats to transatlantic security remained low. When states perceive that the threat is increasing, however, more traditional conceptions of national identity displace the cooperative security model. While a great deal of institutional learning happened through the process of NATO accession and partnership-building in the past two decades, the socialization process stopped short of transforming new members’ security mindsets.
... Large-scale territorial aggression against Latvia or the Baltic states, in general, is unlikely. Russia would face serious challenges to go about such a military operation, the most serious of which could involve provoking escalatory dynamics with the United States and NATO which it would not be able to handle (Lanoszka and Hunzeker 2019). The most likely scenario involves what has been happening already: Canada and its partners in Latvia being subject to an intense disinformation campaign by Russia that aims to sow discord and to dampen public trust (Giles 2016). ...
... Large-scale territorial aggression against Latvia or the Baltic states, in general, is unlikely. Russia would face serious challenges to go about such a military operation, the most serious of which could involve provoking escalatory dynamics with the United States and NATO which it would not be able to handle (Lanoszka and Hunzeker 2019). The most likely scenario involves what has been happening already: Canada and its partners in Latvia being subject to an intense disinformation campaign by Russia that aims to sow discord and to dampen public trust (Giles 2016). ...
Arctic foreign policy, in relation to Canadian foreign policy overall, has not been unlike the relationship of the Arctic to Canadians generally: the subject of polite curiosity, but peripheral. Throughout the twentieth century it was viewed mostly as an exposed flank, as a place where the Canadian government’s hold was more tenuous than desired. It was only in 2000 that Canada first put forward a dedicated Arctic foreign policy to promote its interests at home and abroad—where the Arctic region became a subject rather than a mere object of Canadian foreign policy. More recently it has been consigned as an extension of the nation’s domestic northern policies, under both the Harper Conservatives (2010) and now the Trudeau Liberals (2019). Throughout, the main themes have remained consistent across parties, though their relative degree of prioritization has changed. Canadian Arctic foreign policy has been domi- nated by: sovereignty and security; engagement with Indigenous peoples; environmental protection; sustainable development; and science.
... Yet, many question the immediate deterrent value of the arguably costly signalling by the forward posture of Allied conventional forces in the Baltic region in symbolic rather than actual numbers necessary for thwarting a full-scale Russian attack, given Russia's time and space advantage over NATO in the region and the ability of its A2/ AD capabilities to obstruct the access of the allied reinforcement forces in case of an actual crisis (Halas, 2019;Lanoszka and Hunzeker, 2019;Zapfe, 2017). While nested in NATO's overall deterrence and defence posture, including nuclear deterrence and missile defence, eFP remains mostly a symbolic commitment on NATO's part due to its light and rotational 'mini-coalitions of the willing', rather than permanent presence that is deemed insufficient for striking back should Russia actually seek to test NATO's resolve in the Baltic region (Shlapak and Johnson, 2016;Stoicescu and Järvenpää, 2019). ...
How can ritual help to understand the practice of deterrence? Traditional deterrence scholarship tends to overlook the active role of deterring actors in creating and redefining the circumstances to which they are allegedly only reacting. In order to address the weight of deterrence as a symbol, collective representation and strategic repertoire, this article proposes to rethink deterrence as a performative strategic practice with ritual features and critical binding, releasing and restraining functions. I posit a ritual account of deterrence to better grasp the performance, credibility and the presumed effect of this central international security practice. An understanding of deterrence as a ritual-like social practice probes the scope of rational deterrence theory, replacing its ‘I think, therefore I deter’ presumption with a socially and politically productive ‘I am, therefore I deter’ logic. Drawing on the example of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s enhanced Forward Presence, the proposed conceptualization of extended deterrence as an interaction ritual chain in allied defence, solidarity and community-building offers novel insights about the deterrence and collective identity nexus. Extended deterrence has much more than deterrence at stake: how an alliance practices deterrence tells us more about the alliance itself than about the nature of threats it responds to. The tripwire posture of the enhanced Forward Presence highlights the instrumentality of ritualization for mediating ambiguity in extended deterrence.
Following the end of the Cold War, it was not automatic that the United States would back NATO’s expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, consistent support for NATO enlargement has become one of the central features of post-Cold War U.S. grand strategy for over three decades. What explains this trend, and what effects has it had for U.S. national security? Drawing from international relations (IR) theory and policy debates, this paper evaluates a series of hypotheses that might explain the United States’ sustained enthusiasm for NATO’s eastward march. Finding each argument wanting, it develops a synthetic explanation emphasizing the influence of unipolarity on American international opportunities and the effects this had on the course and content of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. It then assesses the mixed impact of NATO enlargement on U.S. national security, before discussing implications for policy, historiography, and theory.
This literature review explains how strategies of deterrence and compellence relate to military power. Such an inquiry is relevant as much of the literature on military power diffusion focuses exclusively on military platforms and weapons systems. Hence, we advance a more political and strategic approach rather than a more technological approach while assessing military power. The article uses “costs” and “probability of success” to assess conventional deterrence. Although both compellence and deterrence are coercive strategies, they have different implications for the diffusion of military power, especially because of the costs associated with each one. We argue that countries should not replicate or pursue a carbon copy of all the top platforms and advanced weapons systems of a leading state to catch up or to deny the advantages of technological innovation. Hence, denial strategies are much cheaper than control strategies. Finally, denial strategies often result in a decrease in the probability of success in the battlefield of an expeditionary force offensive. The review concludes that military power should relate much more to deterrence than compellence, countering the conventional Dahl’s notion that power is the ability of “A” to cause “B” to do something that “B” otherwise would not do. In other words, military power must be seen as “A” convincing “B” not to initiate a specific action because the perceived benefits to “B” do not justify the potential costs and risks.
Much ink has been spilled on Russia's alleged anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy in the Baltic region. 282 According to many observers of Baltic security, Russia has acquired in the last two decades a sophisticated suite of missile capabilities that it now deploys in the exclave of Kaliningrad and its Western Military District. These missiles are aimed not only at strengthening its defences, but also at improving its wherewithal to perform offensive functions. More specifically, by being in possession of various missiles that could be delivered from the ground, at sea, or in the air, Russia could significantly complicate efforts by the United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members to enter and to move around in the Baltic region should they try to defend their Baltic allies in case of Russian attack. The high price that NATO would have to pay to overcome this so-called A2/AD bubble thus means that the security guarantees that benefit the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania become much less believable. To be sure, some critics are sceptical whether Russia has an A2/AD strategy. Regardless, the evolving missile balance benefits Russia and creates fears of European allies' being decoupled from one another, and from the United States. This problem was further compounded by the termination of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. In this essay, we argue in favour of ground-based, land-attack, theatre-range missiles in Europe. This has several benefits. First, so long as these missiles were not nuclear-armed, such deployments would help produce stability by dampening fears about decoupling in the European context. Second, they would help strengthen conventional deterrence in NATO's northeastern flank-that is, Poland and the three Baltic countries-by holding at risk Russian military assets in Kaliningrad and elsewhere. Third, they could encourage Russia to make costly 281 A longer version of this contribution has previously appeared with the Texas National Security Review: https://tnsr.org/2020/05/the-post-inf-european-missile-balance-thinking-about-natos-deterrence-strategy/ 282 Stephan Frühling and Guillaume Lasconjarias, "NATO, A2/AD, and the Kaliningrad Challenge," Survival 58, no. 2 (2016): 96; Luis Simón, "The 'Third' US Offset Strategy and Europe's 'Anti-access'
The Baltic States are once again worried that their security is under threat. The US and NATO have responded with air patrols, joint exercises, and battalion-sized ground-force deployments. As important as these efforts have been, they do not fully address Russia’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) and precision strike capabilities, both of which undermine NATO’s stratagem for deterring aggression in the first place. Alexander Lanoszka and Michael A Hunzeker assess the current military imbalance and describe two conflict scenarios to show how A2/AD and precision weapons threaten extended deterrence. They conclude with a discussion of the policy implications.
The revival of Russian military power poses certain challenges to NATO and to the West. However, the exact nature of these challenges is not straightforward. This article discusses why Russia is reviving its conventional military power and argues these developments are not limited to the intention of preparing for offensive action. NATO’s and the West’s policy responses to recent changes in Russian defense policy need to be based on a realistic and nuanced understanding of Russian motivations because ill-considered responses could have serious unintended consequences.
Russia's use of force against Ukraine since early 2014 has prompted some observers to remark that it is engaging in 'hybrid warfare'. This form of military statecraft has made other former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic countries, fear that Russia would use subversion rather than pursue a conventional military engagement against them. Despite this concern about Russian hybrid war, existing descriptions of this form of war suffer from conceptual weaknesses. In this article hybrid warfare is conceived as a strategy that marries conventional deterrence and insurgency tactics. That is, the belligerent uses insurgent tactics against its target while using its conventional military power to deter a strong military response. The article then outlines why some former Soviet republics are susceptible to Russian hybrid warfare, allowing it to postulate inductively the conditions under which hybrid warfare might be used in general. The analysis yields two policy implications. First, military solutions are not wholly appropriate against hybrid warfare since it exploits latent ethnic grievances and weak civil societies. Second, only under narrow circumstances would belligerents resort to hybrid warfare. Belligerents need to be revisionist and militarily stronger than their targets, but they also need to have ethnic or linguistic ties with the target society to leverage in waging hybrid warfare.
Russia’s use of hybrid warfare techniques has raised concerns about the security of the Baltic States. Gary Schaub, Jr, Martin Murphy and Frank G Hoffman recommend a series of measures to augment NATO’s Readiness Action Plan in the Baltic region, including increasing the breadth and depth of naval exercises, and improving maritime domain awareness through cooperative programmes. They also suggest unilateral and cooperative measures to develop a sound strategic communications strategy to counter Moscow’s information operations, reduce dependence on Russian energy supplies and build the resilience of critical undersea and maritime infrastructure. Finally, the article proposes that more attention be devoted to resolving unsettled maritime boundaries between Latvia and Lithuania, and between Denmark and Poland, to reduce the chance that these can be exploited to increase regional instability as part of a larger hybrid campaign.
This article examines the responses made by the Baltic States to the threat they face from Russian hybrid warfare. It looks first at the nature of this threat and at the many modes of warfare that are being employed by Russia, including, and in particular, information warfare. The article then goes on to examine the way in which this threat is viewed in the Baltic States and the debate over how it can best be countered. Raising defenses, though, as is made clear here, is not easy. Indeed, this article argues that the defenses that are being raised by the Baltic States will prove largely ineffective and possibly counterproductive.
That Russia is no longer the basket case it once was does not mean that Moscow has a hybrid-war doctrine that could be effectively deployed against NATO.
This article examines how, in a global strategic context presided by the rise of Asia and the US rebalance towards that region, Europeans are contributing to transatlantic burden-sharing—whether individually or through the EU/NATO. As Asian powers reach westward and the US shifts its strategic priorities eastward, classical geostrategic delimitations become gradually tenuous. Particularly important are the ‘middle spaces’ of the Indian Ocean, central Asia and the Arctic, in that they constitute the main avenues of communication between the Asia–Pacific and the European neighbourhood. The article seeks to understand how evolving geostrategic dynamics in Europe, the ‘middle spaces’ and the Asia–Pacific relate to each other, and how they might impinge on discussions on transatlantic burden-sharing. It is argued that the ability of Europeans to contribute to a more equitable transatlantic burden-sharing revolves around two main tenets. First, by engaging in the ‘middle spaces’, Europe's key powers and institutions are helping to underpin a balance of power in these regions. Second, by stepping up their diplomatic and economic role in the Asia–Pacific, strengthening their security ties to (US) regional allies and maintaining an EU-wide arms embargo on China, Europeans are broadly complementing US efforts in that key region. There are a number of factors that stand in the way of a meaningful European engagement in the ‘middle spaces’ and the Asia–Pacific, including divergent security priorities among Europeans, the impact of budgetary austerity on European defence capabilities and a tendency to confine foreign policy to the immediate neighbourhood. The article discusses the implications of those obstacles and outlines some ways in which they might be overcome.
For almost two decades, experts and defense establishments the world over have been predicting that cyber war is coming. But is it? This article argues in three steps that cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. It first outlines what would constitute cyber war: a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conducted through malicious code. The second part shows what cyber war is not, case-by-case. Not one single cyber offense on record constitutes an act of war on its own. The final part offers a more nuanced terminology to come to terms with cyber attacks. All politically motivated cyber attacks are merely sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as warfare itself: sabotage, espionage, and subversion.