Reflections after the IVA and Royal Swedish Academy of Military Sciences seminar

IVA and the Royal Swedish Academy of Military Sciences arranged the seminar on August 27th Inside NATO's New NorthThe starting point was the profound change that Sweden's and Finland's membership in NATO means for the Nordic region, the Baltic Sea region and the Arctic. For the first time, the area can be considered as a largely coherent NATO operational space.

Vice Admiral Jonas Haggren described Sweden's accession process and the extent of the planning work that membership entailed. Lieutenant General Kim Jäämeri gave the Finnish perspective, pointing out, among other things, the need for overall command and control and the geographical problems of transporting large units to and from Finland. Rear Admiral Tim Henry from the United Kingdom, in turn, emphasized the nations' determination, sovereignty and the importance of total defense. The ultimate task is to make it credible that NATO can deter Russia from an attack.

However, this leads to a question that deserves to be pursued a step further.

What exactly needs to be credible?

It is hardly enough to count brigades, aircraft, ships and missile systems. The relevant question is whether NATO can actually achieve the desired effect in the system to be affected.

And that question becomes particularly interesting if you conduct a thought experiment:

Suppose the US is unable or unwilling to make a decisive military contribution to the defense of Europe. Can Europe's NATO countries still close the chain from observation to desired effect?

Platform is not the same as capability

Europe has significant military resources. There are modern fighter jets, submarines, air defense systems, cruise missiles, satellites, transport aircraft and qualified ground forces.

But a military capability only arises when these resources can be linked together:

observe → discover → identify → understand → decide → set goals → achieve → act → verify → adapt.

The process must then be repeatable.

So this is not just a kill chain. It is a closed-loop control system:

SENSOR → FUSION → DECISION → EFFECTOR → EFFECT → BDA[1] → NEW OBSERVATION.

For the chain to be operationally closed, each transition must function with sufficient quality, within the right time, in sufficient volume and for a sufficient length of time. A chain that needs eight hours to process a target that is only tangible for twenty minutes is organizationally existing but operationally broken.

It is from this perspective that the importance of the United States to NATO becomes clearer.

The US not only contributes additional combat forces, it also provides a large part of the infrastructure that connects the alliance's various resources into functioning chains of influence.

Five abilities – and a sixth above them

A European NATO without a decisive American contribution would need to strengthen five areas in particular.

  1. Strategic ISR[2], space situation image and target data.
    Europe can observe, but does not have the American volume and persistence in satellite-based ISR, SIGINT and rapid targeting. The problem is therefore not only that se, without quickly converting observation into information that can be used by an effector.

At the same time, there is significant European technological potential here. GlobalEye, national satellites, commercial SAR[3] and EO[4], UAV[5], SIGINT[6] and land and sea sensors can together create a distributed European sensor system. The critical issue then moves from just sensor number to fusion, information sharing, latency[7] and target quality data.

  1. SEADMore[8]/DEAD[9] and electronic warfare.
    Europe has highly qualified fighter aircraft but less capacity to systematically suppress and knock out an advanced integrated air defense.

There is no shortage of technology here either. The Eurofighter EK with Swedish Arexis, the Gripen E's electronic warfare system, Rafale/SPECTRA, unmanned systems and European stand-off weapons show rather that the problem is mass, integration, ammunition and endurance.

  1. Long-range precision combat – Deep Strike.
    Storm Shadow/SCALP, Taurus and MdCN show that Europe can strike at operational depth. The problem is again not the availability of the technology but the inventory, range, target data and the ability to continue the operation after hundreds or thousands of engagements.
  2. Integrated air and missile defense.
    Europe has Patriot, SAMP/T, IRIS-T and other qualified systems. The greater weakness arises higher up: early warning and countering ballistic missiles and the sensor and command architecture that ties the defense together.

This is particularly important for the Nordic countries. A Russian missile attack on, for example, Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo or Copenhagen creates a very limited time window. It then matters little how advanced the interceptor is if the chain Detect → Track → Identify → Fuse → Decide → Assign → Engage takes longer than the remaining flight time of the threat.

  1. Strategic enablers and campaign integration.
    The fifth ability is perhaps the least spectacular but most fundamental: C2[10], aerial refueling, strategic transport, logistics, ammunition and the ability to lead a large joint operation over time.

There is also a weakness here that cannot be purchased as easily as another robot system, namely experience.

European NATO has not independently conducted a modern high-intensity multi-domain campaign against an adversary the size of Russia. This does not mean that experience must be acquired through war. It can be produced in part through advanced planning, war games, simulation, large-scale exercises, and systematic After Action Reviews.

In other words, Europe needs to create a synthetic body of experience before the experience is really needed.

Above the five there is a sixth

Finally, there is one capability that changes the playing field for all the others: nuclear deterrence and escalation control.

The possession of nuclear weapons by France and the UK means that Europe will not become a non-nuclear actor without the US. But that does not mean that the current US nuclear role in NATO can be automatically replaced.

The particularly difficult issue concerns the limited use of nuclear weapons.

If an adversary were to use a nuclear weapon with a very low explosive yield, a potential gap would arise between Europe's very strong conventional response capabilities and the British and French strategic nuclear forces.

The problem should therefore not be reduced to the question: How many nuclear weapons does Europe have?

The relevant question is rather: Can Europe make it credible that no limited use of nuclear weapons can give the adversary a military or political advantage?

This requires survivability, decision-making, consultation, communication and credibility – ultimately a closed chain of deterrence.

From capability gaps to closure

This leads to a different method for discussing European defense capabilities.

Assume that a future desired final state, FÖS[11], is: NATO must be able to prevent a strategic fait accompli in the Nordic-Baltic area and maintain the ability to restore allied territory.

Then we can backtrace[12], deduce a number of planning products from this state:

FÖS

← sustained military effect
← protection + control
← effectors
← target data
← decision
← understanding
← fusion
← observation.

The question then becomes:

Is there an unbroken path from observation of the external system to the desired final state when all American nodes are set to zero?

Three answers are possible:

  1. The chain remains closed.
    Europe has autonomous capabilities.
  2. The chain remains but becomes too slow, small or vulnerable.
    Europe has technical capability but insufficient operational performance.
  3. The chain is broken.
    An American function is a critical dependency and must be replaced.

The second case is perhaps the most important. Capability gaps not only determine what we need to buy. They determine which ambitions and desired end states are even possible.

At the same time, the Nordic region gives Europe an opportunity

Here we return to Inside NATO's New North.

Sweden's and Finland's membership means that Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Baltics and Poland no longer need to be considered as almost separate defence problems. The Nordic and Baltic Sea regions can be treated to a much greater extent as a coherent operational area – precisely the change that was highlighted during the seminar.

It provides an opportunity to start building European campaigning capacity regionally.

Instead of trying to solve all of Europe's defense problems simultaneously, a Nordic-Baltic operational system could become a laboratory for:

ISR → C2 → IAMD[13] → SEAD/DEAD → Deep Strike → logistics → regeneration.

It shouldn't just be planned.

It should be played, simulated, practiced, and falsified over and over again.

Perhaps the most important question after the seminar

Rear Admiral Henry pointed to the central task: NATO must make it credible that the alliance can deter Russia from attacking.

But credible deterrence requires more than declared political will and a large aggregate number of military platforms.

The adversary must be able to conclude that: NATO sees what is happening, understands it, makes decisions, reaches out, achieves effect, protects its own system and can do it again tomorrow, next week and next month.

It is therefore perhaps wrong to ask: How dependent is Europe on the US? A more useful question is: What American functions are today necessary to close Europe’s chains of influence – and how do we construct alternative European paths around them? That is a considerably more demanding question. But also a more hopeful one. It leads from a discussion of dependency to a discussion of system design, which is perhaps one of the most important tasks for NATO’s new North.

The author is retired from the Department of Management Science at the Swedish National Defence University and founder and CEO of IC2VIL AB. He develops management theories, methods, software and the design of decision-making environments. He is a member of KKrVA.

Footnotes

[1] Abbreviation for Battle damage assessment
[2] ISR, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance: Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It's about discovering, following and understanding the opponent's systems.
[3] SAR, Synthetic Aperture Radar: Synthetic aperture radar. Can create detailed radar images from, for example, satellites or aircraft, even through clouds and in the dark.
[4] EO, Electro-Optical: Electro-optical sensors, such as cameras used from satellites, UAVs and aircraft.
[5] UAVs, Uncrewed/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Unmanned aerial vehicle, in everyday language often called drone.
[6] SIGINT, Signals Intelligence: Signals intelligence – intelligence obtained by acquiring and analyzing electromagnetic signals and communications.
[7] Latency, delay – the time between something happening and the next necessary step actually being taken.
[8] SEAD, Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses: Suppression of the enemy's air defenses. The air defenses do not need to be destroyed; it is enough to temporarily prevent them from operating.
[9] DEAD, Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses: Destruction of the opponent's air defenses. Unlike SEAD, physical elimination is sought.
[10] C3, Command, Control and Communications: Command, control and communication. In the context of nuclear weapons, it is often used NC3, Nuclear Command, Control and Communications.
[11] FÖS, future desired situation, more intuitive term than NATO's so-called End-State
[12] Backtrace, tracing backwards, based on the current situation, a normative future desired situation is set, from which one deduces backwards so that necessary interventions affect the states in the systems-of-system representation in the situation picture.
[13] IAMD, Integrated Air and Missile Defence: Integrated air and missile defense. Connects sensors, command and control and weapon systems against aircraft, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, etc.