RAND Corporation study<\/a>.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s not surprising in itself. Russia has one of the world\u2019s most powerful militaries, and can field vast armies compared to the Baltic states with their small populations. Not only are the Baltic armies small, but NATO reinforcements would be slow coming\u00a0in the early hours of a conflict, allowing Moscow to quickly bypass or destroy the alliance\u2019s defenses.<\/p>\n
What is surprising, or at least not discussed enough, is how quickly Russia would steamroll the Baltic states \u2014 and that has the study\u2019s authors David Shlapak and Michael Johnson worried.<\/p>\n
The study relies on a series of tabletop war simulations of a surprise Russian ground invasion directed at the capitals of Estonia and Latvia. U.S. military officers and RAND analysts played the role of the combatants. They found\u00a0Russian forces will have \u201celiminated\u201d NATO resistance and be \u201cat the gates of or actually entering Riga, Tallinn, or both between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options, all bad,\u201d Shlapak and Johnson wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cA\u00a0bloody counteroffensive, fraught with escalatory risk, to liberate the Baltics; to escalate itself, as it threatened to do to avert defeat during the Cold War; or to concede at least temporary defeat, with uncertain but predictably disastrous consequences for the alliance and, not incidentally, the people of the Baltics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tabletop wargaming is an interesting choice for the study. Although games are not perfect and can only test possibilities, as opposed to an actual war, professional armies have relied on them for centuries. This is just a game, but one with a level of detail and scale that\u2019s difficult to capture outside of a real-life military exercise.<\/p>\n
Here are some of the details. Assuming NATO has a week to detect a coming invasion, the alliance could deploy an equivalent of 12 maneuver battalions in the Baltic states. This includes the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team rushed from Vicenza, Italy, but no main battle tanks. Poland \u2014 which has the largest tank force in Europe west of the Bug River \u2014 would be \u201cassumed to be committed to defend the [Polish] national territory\u201d and blocking Russian forces from moving south from Kaliningrad.<\/p>\n
However, Russia could mass the equivalent of 22 maneuver battalions, including four tank battalions and large amounts of artillery from its Western Military District. Russia would also have an advantage in the air, with 27 squadrons of fighters and bombers compared to 18.5 NATO squadrons. While able to challenge Russian aircraft, the NATO planes\u00a0could not\u00a0quickly establish air superiority. Russian combat planes would then create \u201cbubbles\u201d of undefended airspace to launch\u00a0\u201cmassed waves of air attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an important lesson here \u2014 though Russia cannot challenge the United States or NATO globally, it can do so locally \u2026 and win.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nTo be sure, NATO has additional forces including at least two-dozen M-1 Abrams tanks and 30 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles stored in Grafenwoehr, Germany. But RAND\u00a0estimates those tanks need\u00a0at least 10 days to organize and travel. Not enough time before a Russian victory.<\/p>\n
Read the Remainder at War is Boring<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the event of an invasion, NATO’s options are ‘all bad’ according to a new study NATO has no way of stopping a Russian conventional invasion of Estonia and Latvia short of nuclear war, according to a new RAND Corporation study. That\u2019s not surprising in itself. Russia has one of the world\u2019s most powerful militaries,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2280,74,4333,475,2378,1286,2426,1894,4418,17,10,1898],"tags":[4413,4414,4415,4416,4417,3913],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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