18 May 2021
Strategic analysis and the concept of security have undergone a major evolution since the end of the Cold War. Nowadays, threats are no longer exclusively location-based, but have become more horizontal and less defined. Their orientation assumes a hybrid shape, and they are becoming more difficult to frame, assess, and face. It is in this security context that NATO and the EU operate, a multipolar international system with players making use of unconventional warfare techniques, from the use of deniable proxies to new forms of pressure (e.g., energy supplies, foreign media control and propaganda, mobilisation of ethnic minorities abroad, cyber-attacks) to achieve their foreign policy goals.
Despite these changes, the geographical location of certain chokepoints and their protection continue to play a major role from both a political and a military point of view. In this sense, the Suwalki Gap is of primary importance for ensuring EU and NATO security. Its potential vulnerability in the increasingly tense geopolitical confrontation with Russia, is a central concern for both organisations. For these reasons, their coordination at the roundtables and the on-the-ground interoperability of the various member states is crucial to carry out joint activities, highlighting the rapid response capability in case of an emergency and acting as a credible deterrent to any potential threat.
The Suwalki Gap is a strip of land stretching for about 100km in north-western Poland along its border with Lithuania, and bordered to the north-west by the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, and to the south-east by pro-Russian Belarus. De facto a kind of isthmus of the Atlantic Alliance and the only land connection allowing the passage of the bulk of Western armed forces, military equipment and infrastructure to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia- members of both the EU and NATO. In other words, as pointed out by several analysts, Pentagon officials, and wargames, if Moscow decides to attack the Baltic republics, the first move would be to occupy the Suwalki Gap, thus encircling the three countries and cutting off land supplies from the Atlantic Alliance (Shlapak et Johnson, 2016, 3).
Brussels’ perception of the Russian threat changed significantly following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, anticipated by pro-Russian demonstrations held in Sevastopol, carried out by Russian masked troops which took over key strategic Crimean sites in a very short time and concluded with a controversial referendum which leveraged the large majority of Russian-speaking people living in the peninsula who voted for being incorporated within the Russian Federation.
Although there are fundamental differences between Crimea and the Baltics – first and foremost, EU membership and NATO’s Article V, which expresses the principle of collective defence, meaning that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against them all – Russian aggression has alarmed both European countries and the United States, leading to an intensification of military exercises at the borders with Russia and to a reinforced militarisation of the area around the Suwalki Gap by both Moscow and Brussels: the former feels threatened by the expansion and strengthening of the Alliance eastward, towards what the Kremlin considers to be its historical backyard and Near Abroad, particularly following the Enhanced Forward Presence initiative, established at the 2016 Warsaw summit and aiming at demonstrating the strength of the transatlantic bond in support of the Baltics (NATO Public Diplomacy Division, 2021); the latter is increasingly concerned about the risk of military invasion of the Baltic republics by Moscow, since they are the only region in Eastern Europe where NATO, and Russian territories directly border and because of the Russian-speaking minorities among their populations (in Estonia and Latvia around 25%), potentially favouring – in the wake of what occurred in Crimea – the Kremlin’s claims on those territories on the basis of its Compatriot Policy (Zakem et al., 2015, 6, 38).
The result is a climate of increasing tension due to what seems to be a security dilemma’s revival of the Cold War era. On the one hand, Moscow is adding firepower to Kaliningrad exclave citing NATO’s deployment of an armoured tank unit and several multinational tactical strike units in proximity of Russian Baltic’s Fleet headquartered in the port of Kaliningrad, which in response has recently been provided with 30 new T-72B3M tanks, a naval corvette with cruise missiles and an undisclosed number of Sukhoi SU-30SM fighter jets (Kolodyazhnyy et Balmforth, 2020), besides upgrading its Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) missile defence system, making the already precarious chokepoint between Poland and Lithuania less accessible in the event of a crisis. On the other hand, the Atlantic Alliance has intensified its military operations in the region, reinforcing the defences of its eastern flank through the purchase of anti-aircraft and missile systems such as Patriot and SAMP/T batteries (Barrie, 2021, 21), especially in response to Moscow’s deployment in recent years of SSC-8 medium-range nuclear missiles, capable of striking European cities at short notice and causing the United States to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed with the Soviet Union in 1987 (Kimball et Reif, 2019).
Furthermore, to better deal with Russian “destabilising and dangerous activities”, as remarked by NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg (NATO Press Conference, 2021), the number of joint military exercises has increased, many of which taking place around the Suwalki Gap. Last summer, the armed forces of Poland, Great Britain, the United States, Romania and Croatia were involved in the new Bull-Run 12 exercise, while NATO Defender Europe is currently ongoing.
But what are the required conditions to implement these in-area military activities and, lato sensu, transatlantic efforts in securing the Suwalki Gap and NATO’s eastern flank from potential threats? In other words, how should a Western response be articulated from an operational background perspective? In such a critical context, where the main need is to counter Russia’s geographical readiness advantage, the keywords are coordination, speed, and harmonisation of procedures between the EU, NATO and their member states, to support military mobility as smoothly and resiliently as possible. As the pandemic has shown, the need to move resources quickly and efficiently across the European theatre is crucial to responsiveness throughout a broad spectrum of security issues. In this sense, improved military mobility – as recently emphasised by both the EU (2017 Action Plan) and NATO (2019 Military Strategy) – would render greater utility of allied forces and broaden the range of options for the political leadership to ensure an appropriate and effective response while enhancing transatlantic preparedness to a crisis.
Besides acting as a hint of unity and cohesion within the West and thus enabling deterrence, it would also better ease the activation of the NATO Graduated Response Plans and the deployment of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force as well as the NATO Response Force in support of the national home defence forces and forward-deployed Alliance’s forces to designated areas, such as the Baltic States (Brauss et al., 2021, 19). More concretely, these tasks can be carried out through some rules and common practices between transatlantic allied states, such as:
- Streamline cross-border movement permissions and standardisation of the customs regulations;
- Coordinated chains of command and communication through the establishment of integrated logistic hubs
As far as the first is concerned, the aim is to lift existing restrictions in national legislation, creating harmonised procedures to request and issue border crossing and transit permissions for intermodal transport. Both NATO and the European Defense Agency (EDA) are implementing a legal framework through Technical Arrangements (TAs) to facilitate the cross-border movements of member states’ forces for operations and exercises, and are expected to be completed by summer 2021 (Brauss, 30).
Besides, the EU is following NATO in the development of Form 302, a document used for the transportation of military goods. Although supposedly based on different templates (raising concerns about duplication of efforts) and with EDA still working on a digitalised format, these forms together would not only enable rapid customs declarations through a uniformed approach by the two institutions for the transit of the same military items, but also be propaedeutic to establish a direct link between NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command and the EDA.
With regard to the second, the current process of military mobility rests on a triad of phases that provide the framework for coordinating supply chains in terms of equipment. The national leg concerns the home base and point of embarkation (POE) and requires national-level coordination; the strategic leg takes place between the POE and the point of disembarkation (POD), requiring effective transnational interchange and communication; finally, the operational leg occurs between the POD and the final destination (Brauss, 46), which need and adequate infrastructure complex able to receive the equipment and deploy it throughout the territory.
The distances from the POD in Western Europe to potential theatres of operations along the eastern periphery can be significant and, if not addressed through coordination and upgrades, might cause dangerous delays. Consequently, flexible logistic hubs need to be established along planned multimodal movement corridors for transportation, maintenance, recovery, and storage of assets, fuel, ammunition, food etc. Such a network would ensure the right number of supplies can be in the right place at the right time. These measures are thus vital to back rapid and consistent military interventions that – in a highly vulnerable region – are strategically paramount to guarantee the area’s resilience. Since a crisis on Europe’s eastern flank could potentially break out overnight, with the Suwalki Gap as the most likely target for a first lightning strike, they not only contribute to ease the discrepancies that exist on the operational level planning timeline for the deployment of military forces between NATO (up to three working days) and the EU (up to five working days), but are also a major vehicle in physically strengthening the bottleneck between Poland and Lithuania by improving the infrastructure capabilities around it.
In conclusion, despite a direct and extensive confrontation between Russia and the West is as remote as it is unlikely, the Suwalki Gap represents undoubtedly NATO’ and the EU’s Achilles heel from a security perspective (Hodges et al., 2018, 9). Given the evolving and increasingly unpredictable warfare, it is therefore in the interest of the member states to put as much distance as possible between the prospect of an attack by Russia and their unpreparedness to withstand it at their borders’ most strategic and sensitive points. To deal with this, deterrence seems to keep playing a fundamental role, enforced through joint military exercises, which in turn must be promoted and sustained by political coordination, interoperability on the ground and harmonisation of bureaucratic procedures.
Written by Gabriele Ghio, Researcher at Finabel – European Army Interoperability Centre
Sources
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