CAMP ADAZI, Latvia — After years of facing threats far beyond its borders, NATO is reinvigorating plans to confront a much larger and more aggressive threat from its past: Moscow.
This seismic shift has been apparent in military training exercises in this former Soviet republic, which is now a NATO member and on the alliance’s eastern flank, bordering Russia.
On a recent day, Latvian soldiers conducted a simulated attack on dug-in enemy positions in a pine forest here as A-10 attack planes from the United States roared overhead and opened fire with 30-mm cannons.
Two days before, a B-52 dropped nine dummy bombs radioed in by the Latvians on the ground — all just 180 miles from the Russian border.
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The symbolism of the B-52s, stalwarts of the Cold War arsenal, was lost on no one. At one time, the bombers’ main mission was to deliver a nuclear knockout punch to Soviet forces, but they were put to use for the first time over this former Soviet republic to show resolve on the new front between NATO and Russia, the heir of the Soviet war machine.
“If the Russians sense a window of opportunity, they will use it to their advantage,” said Estonia’s chief of defense, Lieutenant General Riho Terras, who recently mobilized 13,000 soldiers across his tiny country in a separate exercise. “We must make sure there’s no room for miscalculation.”
The military drills that unfolded here, part of a series of exercises planned over the coming months to demonstrate the alliance’s readiness to confront Russia, emphasize the depth of the challenge facing an alliance that for a quarter-century turned its attention to threats much farther afield.
After years of reducing military spending and conducting expeditionary missions from the Balkans to Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa, NATO has had to reinvigorate plans that commanders and political leaders had largely consigned to the past.
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This week, Defense Secretary Ash Carter was scheduled to travel through several NATO capitals before sitting down Wednesday and Thursday with other defense ministers in Brussels to debate how to counter a resurgent Russia.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea — and its role in the war in eastern Ukraine — has already resulted in what NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently called “the biggest reinforcement of NATO forces since the end of the Cold War.”
It has involved a marked increase in training rotations on territory of the newer NATO allies in the east, and stepped up patrols of the air and seas from the Baltic to the Black Sea intended to counter increased patrols by Russian forces around NATO’s periphery.
Most of those are temporary deployments. But in February, NATO announced it would set up six new command units within the Eastern allies and create a 5,000-strong rapid reaction “spearhead” force.
And the Pentagon now plans to pre-position US tanks and other weaponry in Eastern Europe for the first time, prompting unease in some quarters ahead of the NATO defense ministers’ meetings, and strong protests from Moscow that coincided with an announcement by President Vladimir Putin that he was bolstering Russia’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons.
With the leaders of NATO’s 28 members scheduled to gather in Warsaw for an important summit meeting next year, the alliance is already considering what other measures are needed to adjust its forces, to increase spending that had plummeted as part of a “peace dividend,” and to revisit NATO’s military strategy and planning.
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“During the Cold War we had everything there in the neighborhood we needed to respond,” said Julianne Smith, a former defense and White House official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “It’s all atrophied. We haven’t gone through the muscle movements of a conventional attack in Europe for decades.”
NATO’s steps, and its deliberations over future ones, have exposed internal tensions within the alliance over the extent of the threat Putin’s Russia poses. That in turn has colored the debate over how vigorously the allies should prepare.
Some view the threat as imminent, while others view Russia as less a threat than the instability, the flood of migrants, and the rise of extremism emanating from North Africa. A recent poll suggested that residents in some member nations were far from committed to the notion of going to war to protect other NATO allies — let alone Ukraine.
NATO’s response to the events in Ukraine has required a shift in strategic thinking as profound as the one that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the alliance’s main adversary suddenly no longer existed. For years, the Russia that emerged from the Soviet ruins seemed destined to be a partner if not an ally, something Putin himself did not rule out when he first came to office in 2000.
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“I don’t think we’re in the Cold War again — yet,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and NATO military commander, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, who served on a destroyer as a “thorough seagoing Cold Warrior” when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
He added, however: “I can kind of see it from here.”
While some do not rule out a conventional confrontation — something Putin himself rejected as “insane” — others point to the potential threats shrouded in subterfuge and subversion, much like Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its continuing support for ethnic Russians in the war in eastern Ukraine, which has claimed more than 6,000 lives.
Britain’s defense secretary, Michael Fallon, warned in February that there was a “real and present danger” of Russia moving to destabilize the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
A confidential assessment of that risk is expected to be presented at the coming NATO meetings in Brussels. But the potential for such an attack has implicitly been the focus of much of the training and planning going on in places like this.
Now with standing forces of about 5,000 to 10,000 troops, the Baltics feel vulnerable despite being members of NATO. They have no tanks, no air forces to speak of, and only patrol craft and minesweepers to ply coastal waters. Each country is now rushing to correct this shortfall.
The Estonians have a “defense league” that is made up of about 30,000 civilians. Members engage in basic infantry training once a month, receive arms from the government, and in the event of an invasion would be called to active duty to be commanded by professional soldiers.
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Juozas Olekas, Lithuania’s defense minister, said in an interview that the government was developing a more comprehensive self-defense plan coordinating across several government agencies. The army will soon add some 3,000 new conscripts. In January, Lithuania’s Defense Ministry published a pamphlet intended to instruct Lithuanians how to survive a foreign occupation and organize nonviolent resistance.
In Latvia, Defense Minister Raimonds Vejonis said that with the Baltics’ bitter history under Soviet occupation, the public and the government were only too aware of Putin’s attempts to use propaganda and military might in Ukraine to intimidate NATO’s smallest members.
“We will stay united because if we don’t, NATO will die,” said Vejonis, who becomes Lithuania’s president in July.
Colonel Martins Liberts, a Latvian brigade commander who joined his country’s new military when it formed upon Latvia’s independence in 1991, said: “We are all monitoring closely what’s happening in Ukraine. And we’re learning lessons. We’re different from Ukraine.”
Not all of the NATO allies are as ardent. While there has been striking unanimity against Russia’s actions in Ukraine — and separately, the European Union extended its sanctions against Russia this week — divisions remain.
“There’s a hope this is all a bump in the road and with a little bit of tweaking we can get back to the status quo,” the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said in a telephone interview. “In my view, that’s naive. Putin’s not going to change his position, and he’s not going away. You’ve got to be in this for the long haul.”
