Russian deterrence funds to Europe slashed to pay for border wall

To deter Russia from the Baltics and Eastern and Central Europe, the U.S. has invested more than $20 billion since 2015 into a rotational troop presence, exercises and training, preposition of equipment, improved infrastructure, and partner capacity.

The U.S. had been playing catch-up because Russia was not seen as a threat in the aftermath of 9/11.

But projects in 13 countries have been delayed indefinitely according to interviews with U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, and an April 27 letter from Defense Secretary Mark Esper obtained by the Washington Examiner.

“NATO and the U.S. were focused on combating terrorism, and there was no political appetite whatsoever to strengthen those collective defense mechanisms,” Wojciech Lorenz, a security analyst at Warsaw’s Polish Institute of International Affairs, told the Washington Examiner.

The new NATO members on the eastern flank were far overmatched by Russia, and the U.S. had just withdrawn its last tanks from Europe and was down to two operational brigades just before the Crimea invasion, Lorenz said.

“There were no regular exercises of troop deployments, no command structure that would facilitate the defense of the new member states,” he added.

NATO had effectively created two distinct “zones of security” in the alliance. The eastern flank was not defensible.

“Russia was not bluffing that it may be ready to use force to regain the sphere of influence,” Lorenz said.

The answer was the European Reassurance Initiative, a more than $1 billion Obama administration commitment to improve readiness.

Investments included $13 million to improve the Siauliai airfield in Lithuania and $14 million in Amari, Estonia, for barracks, a maintenance hangar, and squadron operations. The facilities allow U.S. and NATO Baltic Air Policing missions.

Even while Trump was making overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin early in his presidency, American troops were on ships and planes being deployed to Poland to establish an Armored Brigade Combat Team.

The efforts complemented and encouraged NATO to make additional investments and troop commitments, including a $200 million commitment to a Polish base in Powidz to serve as a hub for the region.

Under Trump, the reassurance program became the European Deterrence Initiative, and investments grew from $3.4 billion in 2017 to $6.53 billion in 2019.

Army preposition stocks and deployable air bases were dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, and anti-submarine infrastructure was upgraded as each year of the five-year plan focused on a different service.

Heel-to-toe rotations of a battalion task were also sent to a base in northeastern Poland, right on Russia’s doorstep.

The U.S. also started building an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System in Redzikowo, in Northern Poland, to protect against short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Then the border wall needed funding, and the DOD had to take a hard look at which programs could be deferred.

NATO’s ‘growling’ dog on the Russian border

Al Viana, the division chief at U.S. European Command who oversees EDI, explained deterrence to the Washington Examiner as a guard dog in somebody’s backyard.

“If you walk up to somebody’s yard, and you don’t hear the dog, and you walk in the backyard because you don’t hear the dog, are you deterred?” he asked, rhetorically.

“If you hear some growling, you’re a little more careful about walking in that guy’s backyard,” he said, trying to establish the difficulty of measuring the success of deterrence measures.

Piotr Szymanski, security analyst at the Warsaw Centre for Eastern Studies, said risk encounters with Russian vessels and fighter jets in the Baltic Sea region have led to numerous “unpleasant, aggressive scenarios.”

“There are several threats and risks scenarios in our region,” he told the Washington Examiner.

Szymanski said beyond the intercepts, Russian aggression has included cyberactivity, large-scale disinformation campaigns, and a bolstered Russian military presence in an area along Poland’s northern border known as the Suwalki Gap.

There, Russia maintains the noncontinuous territory of Kaliningrad, a militarized outpost between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast and studied by NATO as the potential area where trouble could begin.

So real is the threat of Russian intervention that in 2017 when Russia conducted its Zapad joint military exercises with ally Belarus on Poland’s eastern border, the U.S. sped up a rotational force so that two brigades would overlap in Europe, just in case the exercises were actually a preparation for invasion.

“In the spring of 2016, we started to look at the problems,” said Viana, who has been part of the EDI program since the beginning. “It was more than just reassuring our allies, it appeared like Russia was not going to come out of Crimea.”

Since then, the European Deterrence Initiative has gone beyond reassuring allies to show NATO allies that the United States had the tools in place to leap into action, if necessary.

“What the project does for us, is it allows us to quickly fly soldiers into the theater, match up with its equipment set, and we rapidly go to wherever it needs to be,” he said. “When the allies go to the port and just see the amount of American equipment that comes off of a ship and how quickly it comes off the ship, you get this feeling that, ‘Hey, U.S. is there for them.’

Szymanski agreed.

“It is a huge deal for the entire eastern flank and the Baltic Sea region and Central, Eastern Europe mainly because of the fact that it is not only about infrastructure, but through the European Deterrence Initiative, the U.S. is providing financial aid to allied capabilities,” he said.

“The main goal is to deter Russia and simultaneously to modernize our armed forces,” he said, noting that one can easily track Polish Army and Air Force procurements of U.S. hardware. “The newest, most expensive stuff is bought from the U.S.”

The same goes for the Baltic states, which use U.S. assistance to buy U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

U.S. Navy Capt. Scott Raymond, chief engineer for the EUCOM logistics directorate, told the Washington Examiner that the program hadn’t been eliminated, just delayed.

“The projects remain. They’re valid requirements. What they’re missing is the funding,” he said. “There’s a lot more to our partnerships with our allies than just us building infrastructure.”

Nonetheless, Raymond said it was hard to quantify deterrence.

“I’m sure of this: Investments in infrastructure for things like airfields or stockpiles or fuel or munitions absolutely has to have a deterring effect,” he said. “That is combat power that is available and ready to apply on a moment’s notice, and that is something that if you didn’t have, we could always apply that combat power, but it takes time. A lot of what we do really is the calculus of time and distance.”

The Polish security experts admit that U.S. investments already made have had a measurable impact, but the reduction in funding is a concern.

“I think that it is an error of internal U.S. politics that this administration wanted to direct some money to building the wall with Mexico,” Szymanski said. “This is not a big amount of money for the U.S., for bolstering this presence on the eastern flank.

He added: “This is quite efficient, and at the same time it has a kind of low visibility, it is not like a part of this never-ending wars debate or overstretched defense budget.”

Lorenz admits Russian deterrence capability is vastly improved, but he worries the deferrals may be a sign that investments are winding down.

“If something is cut down, it is always a reason for concern,” he said. “Nevertheless, it is still a Copernican change what we have now and what we had before annexation of Crimea.”