Assessing NATO's "Strategic Advantage"

In my last posting on Wednesday, I made reference to a Quincy Institute paper that argued that if one bundles all of NATO together, while sensibly excluding the USA (because of the increasing likelihood of an anti-Ukraine-involvement under a Trump presidency) and Turkey (which has the largest army in NATO, but whose foreign policy is highly mercurial and, on balance, drifts more readily towards the BRICS and to Russia than to NATO and Ukraine) there still remains a major advantage to NATO over Russia, in some domains even reaching a 20:1 advantage.

I welcomed the paper because it appeared to be asking some questions that are insufficiently attended to by the media of both sides. Furthermore, it was asking these questions at a time when NATO continues, in public, at least, to exude an air of great confidence, and when its members make the strong pretence, at least, of purposefulness and unity. And there have been times, recently, when one could have worried and perhaps should continue to worry that NATO is preparing the ground for all-out war. Led by Washington, NATO has for the most part followed a trajectory of escalation that many people, including myself, believe has greatly imperilled the planet with the threat of nuclear war - not only intentional nuclear war, but also, too, accidental nuclear war.

And “accidental” war can be induced “intentionally,” if that is not too much of an oxymoron. There was an example recently where Ukrainian drones (and possibly one cruise missile - I am not sure that this was ever satisfactorily confirmed) targeted component parts of Russia’s nuclear early warning system thus exacerbating the limitations of Russia’s land-based early warning system by contrast to the superior US satellite-based system. It has been reported earlier today but not confirmed to my knowledge, that there has been another Ukrainian drone attack on an early warning facility in Orsk, in Russia’s Orenburg Oblast. Optimists say that so long as it is only (mainly?) drones that are involved, these are not capable of knock-out damage.

Not only does the US advantage in this matter give Russia significantly less time to react to an incoming nuclear attack than has the US but could also increase the likelihood of Russian error in determining whether or not it is actually being attacked. This might therefore increase the possibility that Russia would respond to a falsely-interpreted signal of some kind and that this response in turn would unleash armageddon. We have plenty of examples, historically, of such near-misses.

The Quincy Institute paper provided the basic numbers of weapons systems available to all of NATO (minus the US, minus Turkey) against those available to Russia and Belarus. These provided pretty convincing prima facie evidence of NATO advantage. The authors argued that this was of concern because Russian weakness might prompt it to reach out more readily to its nuclear weapons in the event that more conventional attacks on Russian assets in mainland Russia were threatening the stability of the Federation.

Mindful of the shocking inability of NATO to compete with Russia in the production and acquisition of essential ammunition such as 155mm shells (it promised 1.7 million in the last year, but managed to come up with only 500-600,000), I have some doubts as to the trustworthiness of the statistics on which the Quincy Institute conclusions are based. I very much doubt that they adequately reflect the depletion of Western arms stockpiles that has occurred over the past two and a half years along with the massive transfer of Western military assets and wealth to Ukraine,(even if a high percentage of this goes directly into the pockets of US arms manufacturers) a great deal of which has been destroyed on the battlefields.

I doubt the claim to the qualitative superiority of Western weapons. Rather, the evidence of this war so far has been that virtually every weapons system introduced into the battlefield, even including HIMARS, ATACMS missiles, Patriot air defense systems, Leopard II tanks and all the rest of it has failed to live up to the hyperbole. And it seems unlikely that the constantly-touted F-16s (thought by many Russian pilots to be inferior to Russian Su27s), of which perhaps 6 will be in service for Ukraine by the end of the year and possibly another few dozen next year, will gravely affect the overall computation. A total of 48-60 has been canvassed. Zelenskiy asked for 128.

Yes perhaps if the number of such systems could be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, well then, yes, perhaps. But the collective West cannot produce such quantities of weapons; its industrial base has shown itself to be unfit for the kind of increase in production capability that would be required. Nor is it at all likely that the collective West could afford such production and largesse. And could the numbers of personnel to use these systems be recruited and trained, especially if the pool of defense workers was limited to people of Ukrainian nationality? Although I am tempted to concede the argument as to Russian naval vulnerability (though am doubtful if the West’s intelligence is sufficiently upto date with respect to Russian nuclear-powered submarines), I am pretty sure I am right in concluding that in nuclear technology (with the exception of early warning systems and, possibly, the destructive power of individual warheads, something in which the US is highly invested), Russia is significantly more advanced, especially in the area of hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles. Furthermore, Russia has shown itself a great deal further ahead than NATO as a whole not only in production of weapons in quantity, but also in expansion of production capability.

In terms of manpower I frankly find it inconceivable that NATO would be able to persuade the citizens of member powers to tolerate any attempt to force them onto the battlefield in defense either of Ukraine or of NATO itself. They are far too smart. Stolternburg recently talked of 100,000 troops in readiness being available in one week, 200,000 in a month and, ultimately 500,000. Without reference to the sheer cost of such an operation, I again find these figures not only unlikely in themselves but also wildly insufficient against a likely response of towards a million Russian troops. The size of Russia’s armed forces and the pace of its monthly recruitment of contracted volunteers is such as to allow Russia just today to announce plans to allow up to 300,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine to take vacations and otherwise to be rotated into this summer and fall.

Despite the extraordinary military largesse expended by NATO on Ukraine for the past two to ten years (remember, this all started in 2014, or even well before then), expert sources now advise that Ukraine cannot even manage to launch its much-touted third major counter-offensive (it won the first in 2022, lost the second in 2023) because Western money cannot be converted into actual weapons in the time required.

Do the Qunicy Institute calculations - can they? - really catch up with the speed of evolution of modern warfare. Just look at the vast range of different drone systems that are now in play on the battlefield, and the many ways in which these transform battlefield tactics. Can they take into account such factors as the speed of innovation in the development of improved versions and of counter-weapons as in the case of the evolution of Russian electronic warfare technology?

Fundamentally, however, the limitations of the Quincy analysis lie less in the domains of technology and numbers than in those of politics and economics. So far, for example, NATO has largely avoided “direct” involvement in the war (even if we may well consider that if NATO collects the targetting information, provides the missiles, provides or trains the personnel to fire the missiles and overseas the whole process from production to firing it is doing something a bit more than “indirect”). It does have some boots on the ground but so far these appear to be mainly in the form of intelligence personnel and contractors and trainers and advisors. Macron’s threats to send up to 2,000 French troops now seem much less likely, even if, as some recent sources attest, there are already some French forces in Ukraine (and there have been several incidents over at least the past year where French and other nationalities have been blown apart, in significant number, by Russian missiles).

For the moment, the politics of “direct” as opposed to “indirect” participation by NATO members is waning - I say “for the moment” because there are no straight lines in the trajectory of this war. Under Starmer, Britain has already backed off from giving permission to Ukraine to fire its Storm Shadows on Russian targets in Russia; the Poles have told Zelenskiy that they are not interested in firing at Russian missiles or planes flying over Ukraine that Poland considers are a threat to Poland; the White House has reiterated its narrow restrictions on Ukrainian use of US missiles beyond the Kharkiv area; and France has loosely complied, saying that French direct involvement has been ruled out.

But we should not allow ourselves to be overly impressed. As these events are evolving, we see escalation in terms of US placement of intermediate ballistic missile systems in Poland, Romania, the Philippines (they have been withdrawn, on sensible Philippe resistance to becoming a target in a nuclear exchange). Now, following the NATO summit, they will be located in Germany, where mobile Typhons are also envisaged. These may evade incoming nuclear missiles, but the areas that these missiles strike will burn just the same.

Inevitably, as recently as June 28, Putin has announced that Russia will now proceed with its own production of comparable, if not more advanced systems.

The case of the US is perhaps the most critical. Biden’s dementia and his insistence on staying in office, renders the country dangerously rudderless. But if the Democrats are still interested in any way in winning the presidential race in November they will not want to have launched a Third World War that will lead to nuclear annihilation of the human (and a good many other) species, even if they will struggle hard to avoid the appearance of having lost the war.

Politics is a bitch, and I doubt that the Quincy analysis is up to the task of adequately factoring it in. Another hitch is the future role of China, amidst reports (that I do not believe to have been fully confirmed) of Chinese troops exercising along with Belarussian along the Ukrainian border with Belarus facing off against Ukrainian and NATO forces on Belarussian borders. This is entirely credible and is the natural consequence of the alliance between Russia, China and Belarus.

We should note that Belarus has recently joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), adding a European dimenstion to the SCO just as NATO turns to the Pacific. The SCO has a collective security dimension. Its recent summit, a few days ago, took place in Astana, a reminder that Kazakhstan along with other “stans,” including even Afghanistan, are lining up in the new order of the BRICS and EurAsia security.

It would be inordinately remiss of Chinese military not to take any opportunity for sprucing up the military readiness of the Chinese army by providing battlefield or near-battlefield experience. This is especially so given that the NATO communique released at the conclusion of its recent summit makes it clear that China is now formally in NATO sights as it has been for some time in Washington neocon sights, and as it was previously in Trump’s sights and maybe will be again, very soon.

In short, those collective NATO resources that are referenced by the Quincy Institute are not intended to serve just one front: they have to cope with an ever expanding number of fronts of war that call on NATO offensives. They increase in line with the rate at which the global hegemony of the US and its vassal states, including European members of NATO, rapidly diminishes. It is astoundingly obvious to any impartial observer that US military capability is thinly stretched across the globe and highly vulnerable to the debris of both marco and micro conflits (see West Africa).

And then we come to the question: what or who exactly IS NATO? Why on earth is this a force to be reckoned a certain victor in a titanic conflict with Russia (or Russia and China, or even, conceivably, Russia, China, India, North Korea, Iran and other BRICS members and some others besides)?

Yes, sure, NATO can broker some new friendly alliances such as the one just concluded between Japan and the Philippines (which, by the way, in the event that in choosing Washington it would abandon its trading dependence on China, will be quickly impoverished). It can play with the Quad (Australia, Japan, and, once again the fence-sitting India), but its bid for recognition as a legitimate military force in East Asia has no grounds whatsoever, neither in international law nor in the East Asian popular imagination. Nobody in Washington has the slightest interest in consulting with the already-established SEATO. East Asia and the crisis of Taiwan with which Washington and NATO are trying to poke China in preparation for yet another war of false pretext (one of the three major current prongs of the collective West’s counterrevolution against multipolarity - Ukraine, Iran and China) stretches the collective West far beyond its capability or its appetite for struggle.

In an article today for Swiss news outlet NZZ, Julia Monn highlights some of the fundamental structural weaknesses of NATO. Yes, it has a collective military budget of 350 billion Euros, similar in scale, note, to Russian. And this could double, she says, by 2028. With Trump as president - perhaps trying to force European NATO members to shoulder even more of the alliance’s expenditures than the 2% of GDP with which 23 of the 32 member States currently comply - one could reasonably envisage this as a goal. But at what conceivable price that European citizens are going to tolerate?

The recent European elections and the elections in France and in Britain (together with the outspoken rejection of NATO expansionism by Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Turkey) are already exposing the thinness of “universal” support for NATO’s arrogant presumptions. This is a body that should rightfully have folded along with the Warsaw Pact in the 1990s but seems fated to ensure its continuation by constant appeal to the threats of Russia, China, terrorism, “autocracy,” protection of human rights or any other pretext that comes to hand (but, strangely, not to the most immediate threats of climate change, nuclear annihilation, US hegemony, Liberal-Neocon authoritarianism or Trumpian absolutism).

NATO insistence on security for its members seems deaf to Russian protests that a “security” that reduces the security of others does not produce security. It produces insecurity for all.

Monn talks, as I have above, about the extensive depletion of NATO weapons stocks over the past two years of conflict. She notes that the post Cold War NATO states have spent more on defense in absolute terms than Russia or China - but much of this is now wasted on the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia spent 1.2 trillion euros; China spent 3 trillion in the period 1992-2022. So they have been accumulating, not wasting, their military resources (and their figures possibly exclude many of the factors that are included in NATO’s assessments). And then, of course, one must introduce the idea of purchasing power parity (PPP) which gives far more bang for the ruble and the yuan than for the dollar.

At the end of the day, only 20% of European NATO expenditure actually went on new weapons, equipping troops or developing new technologies, and 75% simply went on maintaining the status quo. Why? Because no intelligent Western politician really believed that Russia, or China, were actually threats until these were conjured into threat status to resolve, as the Neocons wrongly expected, the diminishing hegemony of Washington. In short, NATO became very heavily dependent on existing stocks which have proven easily depletable.

NATO defense policy, Monn argues, has been heavily dependent on national rather than community priorities. The continent has over 30 different defense budgets, 30 different procurement systems, and 30 different arms industries. It has less power of productive capability than the US, or China, or Russia. European defense industries are fragmented across 2,500 small and medium-sized companies alongside the 30 largest defense companies. Even the ten very largest companies enjoy a market share of less than 5%. Their annual turnover in 2022 was between 4-25 billion euros, set against the industry’s total turnover of 550 billion euros.

European companies produce several versions of the same weapons systems. For example, there are 28 different variants of 152 and 155mm howitzers. Whereas the USA has 33 main weapons systems, Europe has 179. The spirit of national protectionism discourages smooth collaboration. National governments often cannot offer long-enough contracts or sufficient scale of demandm to motivate local manufacturers to produce and, when these do go along, their prices are far higher than for the equivalents in the USA (and, more so even, Russia or China).

The result is that Europeans have made 78% of their arms purchases outside of Europe for the past two years (mainly from the US, also South Korea). NATO is trying to overcome this with new targets that would have members invest 50% of their defense budgets within the EU by 2030, and 60% by 2035. But these are only guidelines, not requirements.

These considerations need to be assessed alongside evidence of a growingly robust and resiliant Russian arms economy. A report by the UK’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) discussed today by Dan De Luce for NBC News concludes that Western sanctions have failed to undermine Russia’s weapons production and that Moscow has ramped up the manufacture of key weapons.

Partly to blame for this, says the report, is “overly cautious” decision making by Western governments and delays in sharing intelligence among Western allies. I read earlier today that Trump will reduce intelligence sharing between Washington and some European countries whose intelligence systems he does not trust. One analyst has speculated that this may relatate to Trump’s perception of European intelligence agencies that might have played a role in fomenting the well-documented Russiagate Hoax of 2016 - MI6 comes to mind - in partnership of course with the DNC, CIA and FBI).

Since 2022, Russia is reported to have dramatically increased the production of artillery rounds, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones. This will come as no surprise to those who have been listening to the defense monitoring of critics such as Brian Berletic and Alexander Mercouris over the past two years. For example, Russian production of Kh-101 cruise missiles has increased from 56 a year to 460 since 2021. Its stock of Iskander ballistic missiles increased from 50 before the invasion to 180 today. It has achieved access to all electronics components that it needs despite Western sanctions. The RUSI report advances ideas for more effective sanctions but seems unable to gets its analytical mind around the reality of the China-Russian alliance and the changing world order under BRICS leadership.