As a result of the increasing fear of a potential Russian aggression against Europe and mounting US pressure on European countries to take more responsibility for their own defense, NATO members recently agreed to more than double their defense spending target from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent by 2035. In addition NATO regional defense plans have been revised and many European countries have invested large sums of money to boost the production capabilities of their defense industries. Unfortunately, instead of delivering relevant, realistic, and meaningful defense capabilities these developments only feed into the potentially lethal illusion of many smaller European countries that they can have a realistic chance of defending themselves against a numerically and technologically superior enemy fighting on its own terms. In reality, in their current form small European countries’ militaries are dysfunctional and, in case of a war with Russia, likely irrelevant. It is time to completely rethink European countries’ approach to defense and, in turn, pursue profound changes for NATO.
The Enduring Paradigm of Combined Arms Maneuver Warfare
While many will argue that warfare has undergone several phases of evolution since the end of World War II, the truth is we still live in the fundamental paradigm of combined arms maneuver warfare created during that war. In the postwar decades, both the US and Soviet defense establishments were organized, trained, and equipped to fight large-scale combat operations. This remains true today for both the United States and Russia, as heir to Soviet strategic thinking, and the defense industries in both countries are designed to support such a way of warfighting. During the Cold War, this paradigm did not stay isolated within the borders of the two superpowers; rather, it was exported to allies and partners on both sides and shining buzzwords such as standardization, interoperability, and integration have been spearheading alliance dynamics ever since. US and Soviet allies were directed to follow the warfighting doctrine of their sponsors, to send their personnel to military schools in the United States or the Soviet Union to get indoctrinated, and to buy the military hardware produced by the sponsors’ defense industrial base. However, regardless of such mimicking efforts, it was an open secret that frontline countries’ militaries were never expected to survive the first couple days of a confrontation and any war would ultimately be fought between US and Russian forces. It sounds cynical to acknowledge, but this calculus is still true for small Eastern European countries today in case of a war with Russia.
The Problem of Small European Countries’ Defenses
The end of the Cold War delivered a shock to most European countries’ defense systems. With the loss of intellectual and material support from their sponsors, small countries’ militaries underwent an identity crisis. Faced with continuous budget cuts, reductions in numbers, and large-scale retirement of conventional capabilities, they struggled to find relevance and a vision for the future. Materiel and institutional knowledge in the art and science of conventional warfare decayed and homeland defense capabilities withered. post-9/11 NATO pressures and incentives exacerbated these processes, with small countries developing and fielding expeditionary and special operations capabilities to conduct counterterrorism and counterinsurgency far from home. Organizational tables, weapons development, and equipment acquisition processes adapted to such operations. Military training and educational institutions overhauled curricula to develop the leaders prepared specifically for these missions. Doctrine writers and tacticians redesigned tactics, techniques, and procedures, and training facilities morphed to accommodate effective predeployment training of these expeditionary formations.
Russian aggression against Ukraine refocused the attention of European countries on their own backyard and especially on homeland defense. This refocus was enthusiastically welcomed by an old guard of army and air force generals and navy admirals in Europe, just as it was in the United States. because they saw the renewed emphasis on large-scale combined arms maneuver warfare putting them back into the driver seat from their marginal positions during the post-9/11 era. Instead of going through a realistic and objective evaluation of reality, most countries simply dusted off the old paradigm and started rebuilding capabilities and capacities that were never relevant. European countries have begun rebuilding their homeland defense based on the misguided idea that small countries can build and maintain capable, US-style, conventional forces that present a credible challenge to the Russian war machine. This is far from reality. Small countries in Europe lack appropriate military culture, physical space, materiel, training infrastructure, military education, experience, and raw human capital to mount a credible, large-scale, conventional defense against Russian aggression. These limitations may be difficult to accept, but political and military leaders must acknowledge reality and develop national defense strategies that optimize their resources for the fight these states are likely to face. That being said, individual national changes cannot happen in a vacuum, and they require major changes in both NATO and US policy.
What This Means for NATO and the United States
The most significant obstacle to fundamentally changing the current paradigm stems from the fact that the US and NATO defense ecosystems are too invested in the status quo and the like adversary’s system is also designed based on the same foundations. Furthermore, current NATO policy requires all member countries to have both offensive and defensive capabilities, follow common standards, and be interoperable across the alliance so that national units can be integrated into NATO formations during operations. These goals are very far from reality simply because they are unrealistic for most small European countries, but more importantly they are also completely meaningless because in the event of a Russian attack—as several simulations have demonstrated—many small European countries’ militaries would be completely destroyed within days, not leaving any standardized and interoperable military formations to fight alongside other NATO nations. So, what can be done? It is time to dust of our most basic manual on layered defense and start building a NATO that is indeed a defensive alliance.
Small frontline countries should become a first layer of defense, focusing their entire defense ecosystem on positional defense. These countries should completely dismantle their current military formations and recreate them with a sole focus on positional defense. Their spending of 5 percent of GDP should focus on infrastructural preparation and fortification of the potential battlefield, both in a physical and virtual sense, including the construction of obstacles, strongpoints, and modern defensive positions. Further investment should be made in camouflage and deception capabilities, deployment of land-, air-, and space-based sensors, early warning systems, antiarmor capabilities, long-range artillery, land, air, and sea drones, and other capabilities that support the effective execution of positional defense. Military formations should be redesigned, and purpose-built for positional defense. Training, education, exercise, and evaluation systems must be completely overhauled to maximize the effectiveness of defensive efforts. Offensive military capabilities should be completely abandoned nationally and be provided by NATO allies further from the potential front lines serving as a second layer, the mobile part of the multilayered defense approach.
Such changes would require NATO to abandon the current idea of standardization, interoperability, and integration and completely redesign its approach based on the concept of layered defense. NATO should divide capabilities among member states as mobile and positional defensive capabilities. NATO and national defense investments into military capability development should be redesigned based on each country’s role in such a plan for the defense of Europe. The United States, as the de facto leader of NATO, should also change its security cooperation policies to incentivize, enable, and support such changes. These reforms would also require major adjustment from the defense industrial complex. Industry would need to diversify production to service the hardware needs of both mobile defense (offensive) military formations and those solely focused on positional defense, as well as develop new production capabilities serving the new and more specific needs of positional defense–focused militaries.
The idea that a NATO alliance is at its best if every member has similar militaries is fundamentally flawed. History clearly demonstrates that small countries cannot defend themselves against a numerically superior and technologically more advanced enemy when trying to fight on the enemy’s terms. But there is a better way. First, if small European countries want to have a real chance for self-defense, then fundamental changes are necessary in the way they approach defense. Instead of trying to mimic the military formations of large countries, small European states must forge their own path with purpose-built capabilities focusing on positional defense. And second, NATO and the United States must play a pivotal role and embrace such changes by changing decades-long policies and incentivize the defense industry base to get onboard.
Shifting to a focused and very clear defense posture is the best possible way of allowing small European states to have meaningful contributions to their own defense. And it would demolish Russia’s narrative that casts its aggression as a response to a threat from NATO, which it characterizes as an offensive alliance. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call that reenergized European defense thinking and made clear that the threat of large-scale war on the continent is real. The challenge now is to ensure that that renewed energy is directed toward the most effective preparations and discard flawed assumptions about how small countries’ can best defend themselves and contribute to collective defense.
Dr. Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces lieutenant colonel with twenty years of military experience. He was previously an MWI and IWI nonresident fellow and is the author of the book Irregular Warfare: The Future Military Strategy for Small States.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spc. Airam Amaro-Millan, US Army