Angry Planet - Can NATO still put up a fight against Russia?

Episode Date: March 3, 2016

With Vladimir Putin and the United States staring at each other like the gunfighters in the final scene in the "Good, the Bad and the Ugly," War College takes a fresh look at NATO. We wanted to know what kind of shape the nearly 70-year-old alliance is in.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. The problem especially in the Baltics and in Poland is you have countries that have a very nasty historical habit of poofing in and out of existence. There are a lot of people around who don't remember the Soviet Union, but at one point, it was incredibly frightening, and the NATO alliance was created to fight it off. Once the Soviet Union fell, many of Russia's former satellite countries rushed to join.

Soon, Russia was completely surrounded by NATO countries on its western flank. This week on War College, we decided to take a look at what kind of shape NATO was in. You may be a little surprised about what we found. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor with War is Boring.

Today we're talking about NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and what kind of kind of shape it's currently in with Joe Travithic. Joe is with war is boring and has been covering security issues for quite a while. Joe, thanks for joining us. I'm happy to be here. So I want to start off with a new report just came out from Rand, the Rand organization, looking at sort of playing the scenario, Russia versus NATO. So what did they find? Well, the Rand report was pretty shocking. It basically postulated that if Russia were to invade the Baltic states

of Estonia and Latvia specifically, but the Baltic states in general, which also includes Lithuania, that they would be knocking on the doors of these country's capitals within 36 to 60 hours. So basically, you know,

less than a working week. So basically that almost sounds like there's nothing on the border to stop. them or does it just mean that we're under NATO is like understaffed there? What, what's? Well, the RAM report looked at a number of different factors when they created their

scenario and then had, they actually had individual teams war game this scenario on a, like a board game, you know, a very technical board game. And there's a combination of factors. There's a basic geography factor. If you look at the map, the capitals of Estonia and Latvia are both less than 150. miles straight down a highway from the Russian border. You know, they're former Soviet republics. They were part of the Soviet Union for a very long time, and this shows in just how they're set up. So all the Russians would have to do would be drive straight down a highway. And if you want to think

about that in terms of distances in the United States, it's about 100 miles from D.C. to Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Right. And that only took about five years to get from one to the other. So. Well, and And there was never a real, you know, the changes in a direct defensive against the Confederate Capitol, you know, a completely different style of warfare. But, I mean, we're talking very short physical distances. And then there's also the matter of the fact that the Baltic militaries, while they have been sort of rapidly trying to modernize and expand, they're small militaries and they have very limited capabilities against more or less the whole might of Russia's Western military district. which is what the scenario designers said would happen. They allowed the red team, so to speak,

to get one battalion from every combat brigade in Russia's Western military district and to throw it into the Baltics. Did they give any prep time for NATO itself? Like to move? Well, so this is the weird thing. I actually, I call into question their methodology in a number of ways. And one of the issues I had was that they,

they really gave the Blue Player very little to use, and they really handicapped them severely in terms of the amount of forces they would have to work with at all, saying that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to basically move in the heavy armored forces and other really big combat units that would be needed to forward this assault. But then they also said in their scenario that the attack came after a week of warning signs, which would have given NATO the ability to move forces into the region,

and also suggested then that there would be an additional 36 to 60 hours to complete that movement to reinforce existing positions. So in my mind, that would have allowed for the additional movement of at least more American troops, maybe also additionally. You don't have to look at the fact that the Poland is not close necessarily to some of these areas, but it's close enough, and they've been rapidly modernizing their force. as well because they share a border with with Russia on on two sides and you know there's this weird little bit of Russia called Kaliningrad which exists on the Baltic Sea and it's completely isolated from the rest of Russia but that's Russian territory and there's a military garrison there armed with short-range ballistic missiles and attack aircraft and the rest of it so that's a definitely a major concern right it's very very heavily fortified right it's a military enclave basically it exists to a allow the Russians to have access to a, you know, a warmer water port in the Baltic Sea.

That is the, you know, it is a strategic position. So, you know, there, there were these issues about how many forces they gave the, the blue player. And that would have radically changed the outcome, in my opinion. Okay. Why would, in your opinion, Joe, then why would Rand run a report like this? Why do people, why are people concerned about NATO's strength right now? Well, because NATO is, it has been greatly expanding since the end of the Cold War.

You know, originally when it was created in 1949, it was 12 members. And now it has, I believe, more than twice that number. That means that basically you've ended up with an alliance. Yeah, it has, it has 28 member states now across North America and Europe. The North American parties being Canada in the United States and then the rest of the alliance being in Europe. And you have an alliance that has an increasingly diverse amount of political opinions and sort of military opinions. And so what that means is that people have a very different idea about where Europe is going, depending on where in Europe they are. And they have a different idea about how that should be worked out in international politics, and it influences how much money they spend on defense.

And so it's becoming an increasingly complicated alliance. Okay, so what are these requirements for joining? Is it 2% of GDP spent on defense? Is that correct? There's a number of requirements for joining. You have to have your military up to NATO standards, or at least going towards NATO standards, and there are various standards of basically how good your equipment has to be,

and whether it works to some degree with other NATO allies equipment, like does your radio network work, you know, all these things. combined with this requirement that if you are a member of NATO, you have to spend 2% of your GDP on defense. I mean, that's a rule. If you are a member of NATO, you are required by the treaty to be spending 2% of your GDP on defense, which is something that no one does. I was going to say, how many of those 28 countries are spending that 2%? According to the last NATO annual report, which took information right up to January 2016, and it was for the 2015 year, four countries in 2015 were meeting that spending requirement.

And there are a number of countries that are close. There are, you know, a few countries that are 1-7, 1-8 percent. But the vast majority of countries are not. There are at least five or eight countries that are not even, they haven't even broken 1%. And, you know, that's technically not how it's supposed to go. Well, and so that, let me ask, does that mean that other countries like the United States are making up the burden or taking up the burden to defend the countries that aren't putting the money in? Yes, I say that there is no doubt about it. The United States complains on a regular basis that NATO members need to basically be able to shoulder their parts of the burden if they're going to continue to be part of this alliance.

and NATO members have differing opinions about what that means. The NATO Secretary General this year said that he was happy to see that spending cuts across NATO had finally come to an end. And in my opinion, well, there wasn't very much further for them to go. A number of NATO countries had gutted their defense spending to the point that, you know, their militaries were going to drive and blow away. You know, the German military is a key example of this in terms of militaries that were basically going to drive and blow away. The Germans have been selling off military hardware. They had been shutting down units.

There's a number of reports on Warsboring.com from a variety of sources talking about the readiness rates in the armored vehicles and the aircraft that they have, and they're abysmal. The tornado airplanes that they recently sent to join the fighting in Syria to fly reconnaissance missions, they've been sending them in penny packets of ones and twos to join that mission, and it's because that's basically what they can find that's able to get in the air. All right, Joe, do you feel that would anybody ever drop out of NATO? Is the alliance really shaky now? Because the way you're talking about it, sounds like there's a couple states that are really, really enthusiastic. and involved and everyone else is just kind of along for the ride.

Well, I mean, at a certain point, one has to ask why you're a part of the alliance. The alliance's eastern boundary, you know, if you believe that Russia has surged in being a threat to Western Europe and the United States, you have to look at the fact that the eastern boundary of NATO has moved quite further forward east. So this means that countries in Western Europe are increasingly of the view that whatever happens, there's still not going to be a land war in Western Europe. I mean, you have to look at the fact that Estonia, especially looking at this latest report, Estonia probably has a very different understanding of its defense situation than Luxembourg.

And Luxembourg is a NATO member. You know, Luxembourg probably doesn't think it has a whole lot to worry about Russian aggression at any time during the week. It feels cynical. It's almost as if some of these Western European states are saying, we've got this buffer zone. It's just Russia taking back some old territory. Well, I don't think, you know, Russia taking back some territory, that may be how the Russians see it. You know, these countries, the problem, especially in the Baltics and in Poland, is you have

countries that have a very nasty historical habit of poofing in and out of existence. Poland has especially has this unfortunate placement of being this large flat space between Western Europe and Russia, which has meant that over the last 500 years or so, it has been continually overrun by one army moving in one direction or the other. And that puts them in a very unfavorable position. They're actually, I just checked there. Poland is the fourth country meeting its 2% GDP requirements. And that's not surprised. Well, you can't feel too bad about Poland if you're going to go back 500 years just simply in the fact that they had an alliance, I believe, with Lithuania, and at one point they controlled huge parts of Russia. Right. I mean, there is some bad blood. There is a long, long stretch of bad blood. But it also then means that one of the things that the Rand report talked about was that in the Baltics especially after, you know, Soviet control and just general historical migration, there are a significant ethnic Russian population.

in the Baltic states. And we already saw that ethnic, the Russians are happy to manipulate ethnic Russian populations to undermine governments that they don't like. And this is, I think, is a greater concern than some sort of outright Russian invasion of the Baltics would be that you have a Ukraine scenario that challenges the integrity of NATO because ethnic Russians within NATO essentially are agitating for either their portions of these states to break away or for the overthrow by political or other means of the existing governments, you know, or what have you. And that's a, that in my mind is a much

more realistic and dangerous situation. At Reuters, we have a piece that I'm publishing that deals with exactly what you're talking about. In Germany in particular, two million people came from Russia who were ethnic Germans and moved into Germany. Germany. Now, many of them apparently still speak Russian, and they have been agitating, very concerned about the migration issue of other migrants coming into Germany, and are now listening to Russia today and other Russian media programs and are being influenced by that to take on Merkel. So the piece that I'm talking about actually argues that, that's an official Russian tactic to undermine Germany. I found that fascinating.

And we've seen similar situations in a lot of these other former eastern bloc countries, right? Like Estonia and Latvia are seeing the exact same thing. Well, we've already seen it in countries that are not part of NATO. You know, in a lot of NATO country, you know, a lot of these countries on Russians, you know, on NATO's eastern flank, joined NATO specifically because of these concerns because they got to, they were seeing what happens when you try to move. on from the Cold War and you try to move on from being part of Russia and you end up like Georgia or you end up like now Ukraine. You know, there are real life examples about what this looks like and it's not, you know, as far as they're concerned, it's not good. You know, you get little bits of your country permanently carved out and turned in armed camps full of Russian volunteers essentially and there's no way to get rid of them.

I think it's only fair to point out, though, that if you just imagine it from Russia's point, of you. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union falls and an alliance that they had built up to counter the West under the Warsaw Pact, those countries were a huge buffer zone for Russia. Certainly read that the Russians now look at things and say, hey, where did all our buffer's gone? And now NATO is right up against our borders. Well, a lot of those nations that were in the Warsaw Pact are now members of NATO. Right. I mean, that's a not insignificant thing to point out.

is that a significant number of those Warsaw Pact nations are now members of NATO. And one can say that they probably did that because of their recent history with the Russians. This was a clear and deliberate point of sort of sticking it to their former overlords who they were not so thrilled with. And this was a guarantor of their security, because as far as they were concerned, what they're seeing happening now was inevitable. I mean, Russia has, before the communists, you know, back to the time of the Tsar, had had a policy of trying to enforce order in many of these buffer areas to provide a buffer against, mostly against, you know,

Polish-Lithuanian alliances and whatever else came afterwards. Let's move for a second away from the idea of it being NATO versus Russia. For a long time, that wasn't really anybody's, major concern. NATO wasn't worried about Russia. There was a lot of talk about NATO having no purpose anymore. And is there still talk like that? Are people still thinking that there's no point in NATO, that it's lost its reason for being? I don't know what the status of that debate is. I do know that for a long period following the end of the Cold War, it was a significant debate and led NATO to do a lot of soul searching, which is how you had NATO interventions.

and NATO-led interventions throughout Europe and elsewhere, you know, as a trying to find their new role in an era where their primary threat had been removed. And, you know, one thing that you have to remember is that, you know, NATO also includes a collective security provision, that an attack on one member is an attack on all members, and that any member so attacked can then call for the support of the alliance. That's a requirement in the NATO charter. And it's only been invoked once. The collective security provision has been invoked once in NATO's history, and that was after the 9-11 attacks. The United States invoked its rights as a member of NATO to call for NATO to provide additional support. And so NATO members supplied additional AWACS aircraft and other things to basically help guard

American skies plus additional just supply support and moving around other things and helping with that general security posture. I mean, that was that was a, you know, a small NATO mission tacked onto the American mission of defending the homeland. I mean, something that's not happened since. And similarly, NATO members can call emergency meetings if they're worried about such things whenever they want. they have this right to call emergency meetings. The country that seems to take advantage of that the most is Turkey. And Turkey has done this three times in the last 15 or 20 years or so, and generally it's not been, because of threats from Russia,

it's been threats on their southern flank. They have been concerned about, primarily about ballistic missiles being launched from various places in the Middle East across their borders. And so NATO has regularly deployed, you know, the recent deployment of Patriot missiles to Turkey is actually not the first time that's happened. NATO deployed Patriot missiles to Turkey around the Gulf War for the same reason, you know, concerned about Saddam Hussein's scud missiles being launched into Turkey the same way. And so again, these are, you know, not what we would consider to be traditional NATO missions.

And it's something that the alliance seems comfortable on one level acknowledging, but it still doesn't change the fact that there's no consensus, I think, within the alliance on still what the mission is. It's like all of our members have these rights, but everybody has a different understanding of how to go about putting them into practice. Well, Turkey actually brings us back to Russia, though, which I guess everything seems to right now, because they just called the meeting, right? Just a couple months ago, because a Russian jet had, as they said, overflown their territory and then they shot it down. No one's disputing that the plane's been shot down. There is some controversy or conversation around whether or not the plane was actually over Turkish territory, right? And so Turkey then immediately went to NATO under concerns that Russia might retaliate, right? Well, and just to make sure that Russia knew that, yes, we are still part of an alliance with a collective security provision.

I mean, it was sort of trying to remind the Russians that, you know, we're not Ukraine. When the Turks do something to annoy you, you don't get to basically come out and immediately start getting more belligerent about it. you have to respect us. I mean, it was a respect thing from most accounts. It was an issue about respecting Turkey's status and the rest of it. And so whether the plane was actually over Turkey or not, the fact that they were operating so close to Turkey was clearly an issue of Turkish national pride, if nothing else.

I mean, there's a huge security issue there as well. But, you know, you can't underestimate the importance of needing to make those statements so as not to encourage such things in the future. You know, if the Russians are looking like they're going to violate your territory, you have to make a complaint in one way or another. And the Turks made a complaint verbally in the weeks leading up to that shootdown, and then they decided they were going to shoot down an airplane to make a statement. I mean, I think that's pretty clear.

Whatever the exact facts are, it was a very clear statement to the Russians. It's almost as if we're watching Russia, the bonds of this alliance at times, even if it's just by accident. I think it would be stupid of them not to. Right. I mean, like I said, the alliance has expanded so rapidly. You know, the alliance has created in 1949. And then the alliance gets two new members very shortly after that in the form of Turkey and Greece.

And then in 1955, West Germany is added to the alliance. And then no, you don't get any other new nation. members until 1982 when reformed Spain joins the alliance. And then there's significant growth between 1990 and 2009. So, you know, it's been unprecedented the amount of growth since the end of the Cold War. And there are more people looking to join NATO. With the exception of Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, Croatia is already a NATO member. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro and Manko.

Macedonia are all interested in becoming part of NATO. I think Montenegro just took another step along that path. I'm not sure exactly where that leaves it, but I think Montenegro is actually very, very close to actually joining. Right. And the Macedonians would be much closer to joining if there wasn't this weird territorial dispute between them and the Greeks. Territorial and the name. Well, but it's based on the name. The name is central to the territorial dispute.

There is a province of Greece called Macedonia, and the concern is that as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia gains more access to international organizations, they will petition for absorbing that part of Macedonia as well. But we digress. Yeah, I mean, but it's, again, this is part of this weirdness of, you know, NATO has a lot of countries in it, and you have to take into account all of their individual political proclivities, and that in turn creates a, you know, difficulty sometimes

in getting the alliance to move forward in a cohesive way. Let's take it back a little bit. Where are NATO forces currently deployed right now? Well, right. So NATO, you know, there are forces. Every country is also supposed to commit a certain amount of their military. military on paper and in name to NATO missions if required. So, you know, every NATO member is supposed to have militaries that are, you know, at least in

part available for NATO missions. When Rand did their report, for instance, they basically said that the highest readiness units in Estonia and Latvia would be available for this mission to repel Russian invaders. So, you know, you can, you can understand that NATO has forces throughout Europe. When it comes to the Americans, the Americans have been dramatically shrinking their presence in Western Europe since the end of the Cold War. And that is one of the bigger sticking points, because America was a major guarantor of security in Western Europe by sheer volume of forces. And that has shrunk. There used to be, you know, many, many divisions of American troops over, you know, a lot of.

with German and British and Dutch and other forces, a raid along the Warsaw Pact boundary at that point. Now there are, you know, a division has three to four brigades, generally depending on what kind of military you're talking about. People do it differently. But now there are only two combat brigades of American troops in Europe at any one time. These are the four deployed units. There is a third brigade that is, quote, unquote,

regionally aligned with Europe, which means that, it's sitting in the United States somewhere, and if things go down, it is also on call, but it would need to cross the Atlanta. And then there's the additional support forces and logistics elements and the rest of it. But there are only two brigades of combat troops who would be available for the fight immediately, you know, if something were to happen. So it really does sound like, I mean, from everything we've talked about so far today, that NATO is kind of, would you say that they're a mess?

I wouldn't say that they're a mess. I mean, you know, these countries all seem to have defensive postures that are in line with their current political understandings of the world, which is why you have the Germans trying to stabilize, at least the state of their military, you know, after the fire sale that was basically the last 10 years. But then you also have the polls who are massively expanding, just massively expanding. And then you have countries like Spain and Portland. who are like, man, we are so far away from any of this for it to matter. And also you had the economic crisis, which pretty much brought them to their knees anyway.

Right. I mean, you know, certain countries suffered much more under the economic crisis than others. Greece, for example. And, you know, there are serious issues that they come into play again because everybody has their own economic system and economic structure and what they, what they determine to be. you know, how they pay for defense and how they do these things and what qualifies as defense. Because you also have to remember that in a lot of these European countries, there's a certain amount of fudging even in their defense spending as low as it might seem. In Spain, for instance, the Spanish Air Force controls a significant portion of the firefighting aircraft. So for forest fires in the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish Air Force is often called out. And so that's technically defense spending, but water bombers aren't.

going to be repelling a Russian invasion. So, you know, there are these various things. And it also explains why the Italian sort of national gendarmerie, their Kabinieri, Khabiniiri. Carbiniieri. The weird paramilitary police in Italy are sent to Afghanistan and sent to North Africa.

And they, you know, they actually do a lot of foreign involvement because they are also technically part of the Italian Ministry of Defense. And so they are often seen as some of the most highly skilled and readily available forces to send on international missions. We should point out also that the United States in particular maintains stockpiles of weapons throughout Europe. And while there may not be troops to use those weapons right now, the idea is still that there are stockpiles of weapons for American troops to what's called fall in on.

And the idea is that if you have the exact same equipment in a bunker somewhere, you can fly in troops who know how to use them, and they'll just get them out of the bunker and in a relatively short amount of time, get them into action. And so there's talk about putting various small of these so-called equipment sets in the Baltics to allow for a certain amount of rapid reinforcement. But as the Rand report notes that these are very small, amounts of equipment currently planned, and so we don't really know what that will look like in the end.

All right, Joe, final question. Is the Russian annexation of Crimea and its involvement in Ukraine a failure of NATO? It seems like that was the kind of thing that they were supposed to stop. And all of the stuff that we've been talking about today doesn't matter a lick if they can't stop these kinds of things. Well, I think that's a debate that's going on about what was NATO's obligation to Ukraine. My feeling is that, you know, NATO was designed primarily as a defensive alliance to protect its members. And Ukraine is not a NATO member. That may be sad for Ukraine and unfortunate for Ukraine, but Ukraine is not a NATO member. And I don't think, you know, at least on paper, NATO had no obligation to defend the territorial integrity of a nation, not a member of NATO.

I mean, the same goes for Georgia. You know, I actually don't remember people talking as much about, you know, there was some talk about it, but there was definitely not as much talk about the failure to defend Georgia. And, you know, again, Georgia was not a NATO member. Georgia is still not a NATO member. Georgia probably will never be a NATO member at the moment because it has a outstanding conflict with Russia, which is not something you want to bring into an alliance with the collective security. provision. You know, you don't want to bring in members that have outstanding actual wars with countries because that's a surefire way to drag you into a conflict. And like any other alliance, the real importance is to never have to use it, right? Deterrence is the name of the game. The Rand report was talking about reinforcing deterrence. Their main gripe is that there isn't

enough NATO power either near or inside the Baltic states to deter the scenario that they presented. The bigger issue that they were presenting was that basically, since NATO can't stop this, the Russians have got to be somehow considering doing this because it would just be too stupid not to consider. And I, well, I mean, I disagree with that because I don't think that that's how they would go about that. I think that they would be much more likely to attempt to destabilize these countries and then seek a political change that's in line. with their agenda. Well, I think we'll stop it there with NATO still whole. And thanks so much for joining us, Joe. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Next time on War College. Today's standard

infantry rifle is as accurate and has as much range to it, really, as the sniper rifle of World War II. Thanks for listening to War College. For archived episodes and other Reuters podcasts, just search for Reuters in the iTunes store. Till next week.