Back at SHAPE, our daily lives quickly became dominated by the crisis in Ukraine and how NATO should respond. At the end of one briefing, SACEUR, NATO’s strategic commander, a genial, Harley Davidson–riding, US Air Force fighter pilot from the Deep South, asked me for my thoughts as a land commander. “Phil,” I replied, “the NATO nations won’t like it, but now is the time to deploy a brigade to the Baltic States to show the Russians that we’re serious about defending them.”
Sadly, and in the course of this book you will see why, this was a political bridge too far for the North Atlantic Council. But militarily and, I would argue, politically, it was the right thing to do. An all-arms brigade of 5,000 men with tanks, armored infantry, attack helicopters, and artillery would have sent a powerful message to the President: “Thus far perhaps, but no further.” It would also have irrevocably bound all NATO nations into the defense of the Baltic States.
I quickly made two more phone calls, to Air Chief Marshal Stu Peach, the UK’s Vice Chief of Defense Staff, in the Ministry of Defense in London, and to Mariot Leslie, the UK’s Ambassador to NATO in Brussels. I suggested that now was the time for Britain to show solidarity with the Baltic States and particularly with Estonia, whose lion-hearted soldiers had fought and died alongside American and British soldiers in faraway Afghanistan. That America’s battle-hardened troops would be there, ready and willing to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and the rule of law which had made the USA such a beacon of hope for the world, I had little doubt. The wheels of government turned and, shortly afterwards, to his credit, the British prime minister authorized the deployment of four RAF Typhoons to Estonia. But the question remained: would the effort be sustained?
And then, at the end of March, my thirty-seven-year military career was over and I left SHAPE to start a new civilian life. I was, however, interested to note that, in May 2015, just over a year after I had first suggested it, the Estonian Chief of Defense called for NATO to deploy a brigade to the Baltic States to show its solidarity with those small and vulnerable countries, as its massive and ever more aggressive neighbor continued to ramp up its military activity on their borders. Sadly that request fell on deaf ears until, under American leadership, the NATO alliance agreed to forward base four battalions in the Baltic States and eastern Poland.
How had it come to this? How was it that Russia, whom NATO considered its most important strategic partner as late as 2014, was ripping up the post–Cold War settlement of Europe in our collective and shocked faces? And how had we been taken so much by surprise?
We have only to look at ourselves to find most of the answers. NATO itself set the scene for what followed in Ukraine. Back in 2008 it gave Ukraine its naive promise of NATO membership; a promise of collective defense that could never have been implemented militarily. The logistical challenge of assembling sufficient NATO combat power to protect Ukraine’s eastern border should have been blindingly obvious, even to politicians who had grown up in a time of peace and knew nothing about war fighting. Put simply, Ukraine is just too far away to defend if attacked by Russia.
Furthermore, this posturing by the West only fed a deep-seated Russian paranoia about a perceived NATO strategy of ever-increasing containment. After all, during the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc countries had stood as a buffer between the borders of Mother Russia and democratic Europe. And be under no illusions, the Russians know all about being attacked from the West. This promise to Ukraine of NATO membership would have put yet another NATO country right on the Russian border. So, add to this Russian fear of encirclement the sense of profound dishonor following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent chaos in Russia in the 1990s, and the result for proud Russians was a toxic brew.
We in the West might struggle to understand that real sense of personal dishonor felt so deeply by patriotic young officers who had served in the military and KGB at the apogee of Soviet power—men like the President—but that sense of dishonor is real and we need to accept it and factor it into our calculations.
Of course, Putin had already shown himself to be a ruthless opportunist when he took the cool and brutal decision to invade Georgia back in 2008, at the exact moment the world’s attention was focused on the Beijing Olympic Games. Despite this, after some perfunctory initial protests, the West quickly returned to business as usual. After all, Georgia was so far beyond NATO’s sphere of influence and so deep in Russia’s, there was little we could do. So an initial Russian toe in the invasion waters had shown Putin what he could get away with; Hitler and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 came strongly to my mind, even as far back as 2008.
If this were not bad enough, there were other political and military blunders which, compounded together, gave an impression of growing Western weakness to the ever-watching Russians.
There was President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted new “Asia–Pacific pivot,” which demonstrated Europe’s reduced strategic importance to the United States. It was signalled by the massive reduction in American forces stationed in Germany. How ironic it was that, a month after Putin invaded Crimea, the last American tanks left German soil after sixty-nine years. Once there were over 6,000 NATO tanks in Germany, most of them American: a massive statement of America’s determination to protect Europe. It is a simple fact of military life that, once you cut capability, it requires a superhuman effort to regenerate it. Storing mothballed tanks and other vehicles of war in Eastern Europe, as the Americans first did in 2015, does not by itself create a credible military capability. That requires manpower, training, logistics, and commitment and, equally important, enough time to pull everything together so they can operate as an effective team.
The impression of America’s decreasing interest in Europe was further reinforced by Obama’s abdication of diplomatic efforts to contain Russia in Ukraine in 2014. Don’t forget that America, together with Russia and the UK, were signatories of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in return for US and Russian guarantees of its territorial integrity. Russia had torn up the Budapest Memorandum and Obama had chosen to forget American promises. I have served under the finest American generals and admirals in peace and war and know only too well that American leadership remains crucial to the defense and security of the free world—so this was not a good signal to send Russia, or the world.
The United Kingdom, Europe’s premier military power since the Second World War, was led, from 2010, by a coalition Prime Minister, David Cameron, who appeared increasingly backward-leaning on the international scene. His Defense Review of 2010 was nothing more than a gamble based on an assumption that the international scene would remain benign. Wars and conflicts that threatened the security of the United Kingdom were declared a thing of the past. The UK’s national strategy proclaimed that there was no existential threat to these shores. How irresponsibly naive that sounds, as I write these words today.
Having unilaterally decided that this was the way the world would be for the foreseeable future, the 2010 Review then emasculated British military capability. The consequences are far-reaching and difficult, if not near impossible, to reverse: 20,000 experienced regular soldiers were axed from the Army, nearly a quarter of its strength. Royal Navy frigate and destroyer numbers—the work horses of any fleet—were cut right back. Some ships came off station from the Libyan maritime embargo in 2011 and sailed direct to the breaker’s yard. It seemed quite extraordinary to me at the time to see our warships being broken up at the very moment they were most needed. The unraveling of Libya and the deepening turmoil of the Arab Spring ought to have told any politician with any sense that the world was not as safe and predictable as they were busy assuring us it was. Not only were Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers removed from the inventory, but that essential capability for a proud maritime nation, maritime patrol aircraft, was also disbanded. It would be difficult to overstate the disbelief of our allies or delight of our enemies at this shortsighted decision.