NATO is thinking to increase its military presence in Eastern Europe in order to deter Russia. The NATO meeting next week in Brussels will see the defence ministers of the alliance members to outline the plans to increase NATO’s presence and troop rotations along the border with Russia. It is perceived that NATO will plan to create several smaller outposts throughout Eastern Europe to base troops on rotation, preposition materiel for a rapid response and from which war games can be hosted.
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| Operation Trident Juncture - NATO's last training exercise aimed to test its reaction capabilities against a Russian agression |
The sudden increase of NATO about its Eastern Flank comes days after a report published by the RAND cooperation. In the report is the summary of several wargames RAND did between the summer of 2014 and spring 2015. The result was that Russia cold overrun Estonia and Latvia between 36 to 60 hours. The report recommended that a credible deterrent can only be formed when seven heavy brigades are stationed in the region, three of them have to be armoured brigades.
It is unlikely that NATO will adopt the proposals made by the RAND cooperation. NATO leaders are indeed planning to station more troops in Eastern Europe as well as preposition materiel but this will be along the whole frontier of Eastern Europe, not only in the exposed region of the Baltic States. NATO plans to station in total up to 40.000 new troops in Eastern Europe, including air, maritime and special operations units. Even though this seems like a vast amount of numbers it still dwarfs compared to the 300.000 US troops stationed in Europe alone during the Cold War. It will be important however to see how Russia will react to this deployment of force. Russia views NATO as a threat to its national security and is strongly against any eastward move made by NATO.
Also important to note is that these troops are on a rotational basis and will not be stationed permanent in the region. In this case NATO is going against the wishes of Poland and the Baltic States whom might even go so far as paying for these permanent bases. These four countries have been regularly occupied by Russia in their history and seeking NATO support to maintain their independence. The best way to guarantee this will be to have foreign troops stationed permanently in these countries. Even if these troop deployments are small and symbolic they send the message that an attack will automatically and directly draw in other nations.
analysis
NATO’s concern for Eastern Europe keeps increasing as Russia is becoming more and more assertive in its periphery. The alliance realizes that it needs a stronger presence in Eastern Europe in order to create a more credible deterrence. At the same time it doesn’t want to antagonize Russia too much and makes this contribution as small as possible while still being effective. It will be important to see however how Russia will react to this new troop stationing along its borders.
