Deterrence from the Ground Up: Understanding NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence

NATO’s deterrence strategy must take into account the fundamentally political nature of the Russian threat. As a nuclear alliance, NATO’s deterrence is ultimately based on the threat of nuclear retaliation. However, Russia under President Vladimir Putin seems to have rejected the established Western playbook, opting instead for ‘cross-domain coercion’11 See Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, ‘CrossDomain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy’, Proliferation Papers, no. 54, November 2015. View all notes that transcends conventions in deterrence, most importantly the balance between conventional and nuclear forces. NATO’s answer since 2014 has been largely based on conventional adaptation mirroring similar evolutionary steps in the Alliance’s history. Important as these measures may be, there is a danger that they will fall short of enhancing allied deterrence, and may even be harmful to it, if they do not take into account the essentially political nature of the Russian threat. At its 2016 summit in Warsaw, NATO agreed on an Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) of four multinational battalion task forces in the Baltics. This allied force posture will necessarily form an integral part of NATO’s deterrence for the years ahead. Yet recent analyses have consistently failed to demonstrate sufficient understanding of the deterrence value of a limited conventional forward presence in NATO’s east, and of its conceptual limits in sub-conventional (‘hybrid’) and conventional scenarios. The purpose of this article is thus to answer one key question: what is the politico-military logic of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltic states given the nature of the threats it faces there, and what are its strategic effects and conceptual limits in non-nuclear deterrence? Assuming that, by mid-2017, all four multinational battalion battle groups will be complete, combat ready and in position – what then?