War with Russia

And then, at the end of March, my thirty-seven-year military career was over and I left SHAPE to start a new civilian life. I was, however, interested to note that, in May 2015, just over a year after I had first suggested it, the Estonian Chief of Defense called for NATO to deploy a brigade to the Baltic States to show its solidarity with those small and vulnerable countries, as its massive and ever more aggressive neighbor continued to ramp up its military activity on their borders. Sadly that request fell on deaf ears until, under American leadership, the NATO alliance agreed to forward base four battalions in the Baltic States and eastern Poland.

How had it come to this? How was it that Russia, whom NATO considered its most important strategic partner as late as 2014, was ripping up the post–Cold War settlement of Europe in our collective and shocked faces? And how had we been taken so much by surprise?

We have only to look at ourselves to find most of the answers. NATO itself set the scene for what followed in Ukraine. Back in 2008 it gave Ukraine its naive promise of NATO membership; a promise of collective defense that could never have been implemented militarily. The logistical challenge of assembling sufficient NATO combat power to protect Ukraine’s eastern border should have been blindingly obvious, even to politicians who had grown up in a time of peace and knew nothing about war fighting. Put simply, Ukraine is just too far away to defend if attacked by Russia.

Furthermore, this posturing by the West only fed a deep-seated Russian paranoia about a perceived NATO strategy of ever-increasing containment. After all, during the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc countries had stood as a buffer between the borders of Mother Russia and democratic Europe. And be under no illusions, the Russians know all about being attacked from the West. This promise to Ukraine of NATO membership would have put yet another NATO country right on the Russian border. So, add to this Russian fear of encirclement the sense of profound dishonor following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent chaos in Russia in the 1990s, and the result for proud Russians was a toxic brew.

We in the West might struggle to understand that real sense of personal dishonor felt so deeply by patriotic young officers who had served in the military and KGB at the apogee of Soviet power—men like the President—but that sense of dishonor is real and we need to accept it and factor it into our calculations.

Of course, Putin had already shown himself to be a ruthless opportunist when he took the cool and brutal decision to invade Georgia back in 2008, at the exact moment the world’s attention was focused on the Beijing Olympic Games. Despite this, after some perfunctory initial protests, the West quickly returned to business as usual. After all, Georgia was so far beyond NATO’s sphere of influence and so deep in Russia’s, there was little we could do. So an initial Russian toe in the invasion waters had shown Putin what he could get away with; Hitler and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 came strongly to my mind, even as far back as 2008.

If this were not bad enough, there were other political and military blunders which, compounded together, gave an impression of growing Western weakness to the ever-watching Russians.

There was President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted new “Asia–Pacific pivot,” which demonstrated Europe’s reduced strategic importance to the United States. It was signalled by the massive reduction in American forces stationed in Germany. How ironic it was that, a month after Putin invaded Crimea, the last American tanks left German soil after sixty-nine years. Once there were over 6,000 NATO tanks in Germany, most of them American: a massive statement of America’s determination to protect Europe. It is a simple fact of military life that, once you cut capability, it requires a superhuman effort to regenerate it. Storing mothballed tanks and other vehicles of war in Eastern Europe, as the Americans first did in 2015, does not by itself create a credible military capability. That requires manpower, training, logistics, and commitment and, equally important, enough time to pull everything together so they can operate as an effective team.