Just 36 hours to take Riga and Tallin. Less than three days to occupy Estonia and Latvia, destroy the defense of NATO and leave the West with a fait accompli. Just like in Crimea. That’s what a wargame by the Rand Corporation says.
The 22 maneuver battalions of the Western Military District of the Russian army performed a short-warning attack on the border with Latvia. They made a main effort toward the Latvian capital of Riga, with a secondary attack that quickly secured the predominantly ethnic Russian areas of northeast Estonia, and then proceeded toward Tallinn. The 12 NATO battalions deployed in the areasought to use indigenous forces to delay Red’s advance along major axes while positioning the bulk of their forces in and around Tallinn and Riga in an attempt to sustain a minimal lodgment in and around the two capitals.
The outcome was, bluntly, a disaster for NATO. Russian forces eliminated or bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours.
“The defense of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius is just as important as that of Berlin, Paris and London,”Barack Obamasaidin a September 2014 speech during his visit to Estonia in 2014, right in the middle of Russian aggression on Ukraine. “Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all. We’ll be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here forLithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again.”
The truth, however, is that NATO cannot defend the Baltic countries.
Like Crimea
Rand Corporation is a US based think tank specializing in security thatoften works with the US Defense, and boasts 31 Nobel prizes among its past and present analysts. The report entitled “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank” summarizes the results of many wargames that experts of the US armed forces in Europe and NATO have made over the last year.
During the years of the Cold War, NATO deployed on its borders in Europe eight Allied corps and 20 divisions. Today on the line that separates the Baltic from Russia and Belarus, more or less long as that between West Germany and the Warsaw Pact, there are only three brigades of light infantry of the national armies.
A Russian coup de main in Latvia and Estonia would put the West in front of an accomplished fact, just as it happened in Crimea and, to some extent, in Donbass. Facing a fait accompli, according toRand experts, NATO would have three options. One worse than the other.
The most obvious would bemobilizingforcesforacounteroffensivetoejectRussianforcesfromLatviaandEstonia. The leaders and people of the Baltic states would need to decide whether to fight, and it is far from certain that they would be willing to turn their capitals into battlefields. It is an option that would offer a high risk of escalation, because it would be seen by Moscow as an attack on Russia.
The second option would be retrieving the Cold War doctrine of “massive retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied.
The third possibility would be to concede Russian control of the territory they had occupied, not recognizing the occupation and giving way to a new climate of the Cold War.
Does this soung already heard?
A reason to exist
“Vladimir Putin has now attacked neighboring countries three times, with his second invasion of Ukraine still unfolding. His pursuit of greater Russian influence along Moscow’s periphery has ended what was nearly a generation of post–Cold War peace and stability in Europe and revived legitimate fears of Moscow’s intentions among its neighbors.After eastern Ukraine, the next most likely targets for an attempted Russian coercion are the Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.”That’s what the report reads.
It is hard to say whether there is a real danger of a Russian attack on the Baltics, but who would have said the same two years ago about Ukraine? The large ethnic Russian communities who live mainly in Estonia and Latvia could offer Putin a pretext too similar to the one that justified the military annexation of Crimea. Who does remember his speech on the right to defend the Russian community spread outside Russia after the collapse of the USSR?
Fortunately, according to the report, there is a solution. A force of about seven brigades, including three heavy armored brigades,could suffice to prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states. It would not cost much even, it says: 2.7 billion per year.
It might seem a coincidence that the report was released in the same day Defense Secretary Ashton Carter unveiled a US$ 3.4 billionplan in heavy weapons and armored vehicles in eastern Europe. But of course it is not.
The alarming news spread by Rand goes – and could not be otherwise for a think tank created as a project of military development, and that has made the history of the Cold War – in hand with the requestsof higher budgetby the US military and NATO. The latter, indeed, looking also for a reason to exist.
Let’s say that Putin is offering a good one.
@daniloeliatweet
