The biggest exercise NATO has held since the end of the cold war, Steadfast Defender 24, began on January 24th and will run to the end of May. Involving some 90,000 personnel from the armed forces of 31 NATO allies plus Sweden, whose membership should be completed shortly, it is aimed at showing how NATO can rapidly deploy forces from North America and from across Europe to repel an attack by a “near-peer adversary”—ie, Russia.
Since last year’s summit in Vilnius, the alliance has been working both to ensure that 300,000 troops are kept in a state of high readiness and on establishing the force structures to deal with an attack wherever it may come from. As well as having many more members than during the cold war, NATO also has a much longer border to defend. A key finding of the exercise will be what more needs to be done to enable frictionless movement of much larger forces across national boundaries in the event of a real crisis or pre-crisis.
The answer is likely to be quite a lot. Since the cold war, moving forces across Europe has become entangled in a web of national regulations and customs requirements, while the physical infrastructure needed, such as resilient rail systems and bridges strong enough to bear the weight of tank transporters, has been neglected.
Improving military mobility in Europe by tackling these obstacles has supposedly been a major priority for both NATO and the European Union ever since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Four years later, military mobility was added to the “joint declaration” that the EU and NATO had first issued in 2016 on how the two organisations could work together in a complementary way. The EU went on to create an action plan for military mobility, dubbed the “Military Schengen”, and a Dutch-led project, PESCO (Permanent Structured Co-operation) was set up to make it happen.
So far PESCO has been a disappointment. Ben Hodges, who was the commander of American forces in Europe until 2017 and now advises NATO on logistics, says PESCO is broken “because they took the money away”. The European Commission had proposed €6.5bn ($7.1bn) to fund 95 projects to support military mobility as part of the EU budget for 2021-27. However, after negotiations with member countries, that was cut to €1.69bn.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU injected greater urgency by announcing a fresh plan covering four main pillars: so-called “multimodal corridors”; regulatory reform; resilience and preparedness (particularly focused on security threats to transport systems); and “dedicated partnerships”, which essentially means close co-operation between the EU and NATO, to which end America, Canada, Norway and Britain have all joined PESCO. In January the EU declared that the €1.69bn had been spent, and it was now allocating a further €807m for 38 additional projects aimed at improving the transport of troops and equipment.
Since then, the Netherlands together with Germany and Poland have announced a new plan to develop a military corridor for the movement of forces from Europe’s North Sea ports to NATO’s eastern flank. It will address transport choke points, such as low or weak bridges (tanks weigh a lot more than they used to) and the bureaucracy that requires permits to move munitions across borders. It will also give priority when needed to military rail requirements over civilian traffic. General Hodges says that the alliance must, for example, be able to move forces from Rotterdam to the Polish border in no more than 90 hours. For deterrence to be serious, he says, you need to show you can shift forces faster from A to B than the Russians can.
But he warns that apart from reforming the legal and regulatory framework, you have to have enough rail cars to transport heavy military equipment. Ukraine has demonstrated just how vital trains are in getting tanks, other fighting vehicles and munitions to the front line. But in discussions with the German rail network operator Deutsche Bahn, General Hodges found that it may have less than 10% of the rail cars that would be needed in a crisis.
NATO’s concerns also include a shortage of military bridging equipment and inadequate “host nation support” for arriving forces. A single armoured brigade with at least 50 tanks must have 15km2 of space to meet all its requirements. General Hodges says NATO should do much more forward warehousing of parts and munitions. Both assembly points and logistics hubs will also have to be protected from attack. Referring to the experience of Ukrainian forces, a senior NATO official says: “We have a requirement for a lot more air and missile defence. We are about to give allies the biggest demand signal for the next decade.” ■
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Moving weapons around Europe fast is crucial for deterring Russia - The Economist
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