C T Online Desk: US troops stage an airborne assault. British marines conduct a nighttime beach landing. French paratroopers drop from the skies after flying across Europe.
In Estonia, on NATO’s eastern flank, the allies train in the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The message is clear.
“It says that at short notice we can deploy very fast,” said Lieutenant Colonel Edouard Bros, commander of the French troops in Estonia and taking part in the Spring Storm exercise.
Fifteen months into Russia’s war on Ukraine, and a month ahead of a summit of NATO leaders in Vilnius, the alliance is reinforcing its eastern defences.
Now that Moscow has ripped up decades of post-Cold War order, NATO is conducting the biggest overhaul to its defences and planning in a generation.
“This change will move us from an alliance that was optimised for out of area contingency operations to an alliance fit for the purpose of large-scale operations to defend every inch of the alliance’s territory,” US General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, said this month.
“This is necessitated by the new realities we face.”
At a summit in Madrid last year, spurred on by the destruction Russian troops wrought in Ukraine, NATO reverted to “deterrence by denial” as it had during the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union.
That means stopping any attack by Moscow at the borders, rather than being willing to cede frontline territory such as the Baltics, which would then need to be recaptured.
“What is clear is that NATO made a strategic shift,” said Kristjan Mae, the head of the policy planning department at Estonia’s defence ministry.
“Collective defence is the most important task and we need to get our house in order.”
