Putin has changed the world — and the US must adapt or lose

Vladimir Putin has fundamentally altered the world as we have known it since the end of the Cold War.

The post-Cold War order was built on the absence of a meaningful Russian conventional military threat. U.S. military posture, NATO military spending and deployments, war plans, and national security strategies have assumed away the risk of large-scale conventional conflict in Europe for three decades.

The many thousands of Russian tanks around and moving into Ukraine today have crushed that assumption under their treads. The U.S. and NATO must rethink their national security strategies, defense budgets and deployments from the ground up and for the long term. 

Putin has invested large amounts of money to rebuild Russia’s conventional capabilities over the last decade. His willingness to spend so much on his military, despite Russia’s dire economic straits, shows a Soviet-like willingness to sacrifice his people’s well-being for armed might. The process began after the Russian military’s poor performance during the 2008 invasion of Georgia and has accelerated dramatically over the past few years. Russian ground forces have reorganized themselves to be able to conduct large-scale maneuver warfare. Putin is re-equipping all his forces with more modern equipment. The Russian military has, most importantly, been conducting regular unannounced large-scale military exercises involving land, sea, air, nuclear and cyber forces, multiple times a year. Such exercises are very expensive. They also are essential to prepare a force for war.

Putin has quietly moved the Russian border 300 miles to the west by completing the de facto incorporation of the Belarusian armed forces into the Russian military and moving Russian troops to the Polish-Belarusian border. Russia already had a relatively large concentration of forces of all types in the Kaliningrad exclave, threatening both Poland and Lithuania. The isolation of that exclave and its distance from the rest of Russia had made the prospect of using those forces to attack NATO remote and very risky. But the appearance of large Russian forces in Belarus changes that equation profoundly; Russian troops attacking from Kaliningrad could now expect rapid reinforcements from Belarus and could contemplate pincer attacks into Poland, Lithuania, or both. 

Putin has demonstrated his ability to draw on his entire military to threaten NATO, not just those troops that happen to be near NATO’s frontiers. He’s drawn tens of thousands of troops from Russia’s Far East and Central Asian regions and stationed them on the Polish and Ukrainian borders. The — again, very expensive — movement of so many troops from the Pacific Ocean to Belarus is a message the West must receive and respond to: The Russian conventional threat to NATO is large, real, and enduring.

Putin has sent NATO another message in the demands he has made during this crisis, only some of which address Ukraine. He is insisting that NATO withdraw all its military infrastructure from member states admitted after the end of the Cold War — that is, from all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. His demand that NATO freeze further expansion is enveloped in his larger claim to suzerainty, at least, over all former Soviet states. He hasn’t yet demanded that the Baltic States leave the alliance, but he will if he isn’t checked first.

We needn’t wonder about Putin’s ultimate objectives any more than we had to speculate about Hitler’s: He tells us all the time that he intends to destroy the NATO alliance, drive the U.S. from Europe and re-establish the Soviet sphere of influence.

Putin’s demands regarding post-Cold War NATO members strongly suggest that he does not see that sphere as truly stopping at the former Soviet border; he has spent money he doesn’t really have to build a military that could seriously challenge and possibly defeat the forces NATO currently has in its eastern member states.

It’s past time to take this threat seriously and understand that it will not pass, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. 

The U.S. should start by ripping up the draft National Security and National Defense Strategies. China is one pacing threat, but Russia is another. The two threats pose largely different challenges; meeting them imposes different requirements.

America can’t shift away from forces needed to fight conventional mechanized warfare, as current documents and budgets propose, to the air-naval capabilities essential for fighting in the Pacific — not after Putin has recreated and demonstrated the willingness to use conventional mechanized forces on a large scale. Neither can the U.S. military focus on modernization — the challenge China poses — at the expense of rebuilding the capability to defeat large-scale attack by “legacy” forces like Russia’s.

The U.S. must also re-posture its military to prepare for a rapid, unheralded attack in Europe. The withdrawal of most American mechanized forces from Europe to the U.S., begun in the 2000s, was always a mistake, as it put an ocean between them and any likely conflict. It would be inexcusable to allow that mistake to continue under current circumstances. The U.S. must permanently redeploy heavy forces to Europe at the scale required to stop a Russian attack against NATO on virtually no notice. It must maintain in Europe the stealth aircraft and other air and maritime assets needed to penetrate one of the world’s most advanced air- and coastal-defense systems.  And it must do all that while simultaneously increasing its forward-deployment in Asia, building up the air, sea and land forces urgently needed to deter and, if necessary, defeat Chinese aggression, and modernizing to meet and surpass China’s advancing technological edges. The U.S. still has vital national security interests in the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, moreover; America must recreate the ability to fight and win in multiple, widely-separated theaters at the same time — an ability it has not had since the end of the Cold War.

The U.S. can’t do it alone, of course. NATO must step up as well; it must dramatically increase military expenditures and reposition its own conventional forces to defend its eastern members. It must re-embrace its original purpose of deterring and defending against a major conventional military threat from the east. It must recognize that Putin has brought the Cold War back and seeks to rehang the Iron Curtain.

These proposals will be expensive and unpopular. Americans and Europeans alike do not want to fight anywhere. They don’t like arms races; they don’t like wars, cold or hot.

We must face reality, however. It takes one to make war, not two. Putin has shown that he is willing to fight to gain what he wants, and what he wants is the destruction of the Western alliance that kept the peace in Europe for more than seven decades. We must be willing to fight to defend it — and we must be willing to pay the price of doing so.

Frederick W. Kagan is the director of the Critical Threats Project and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He also advises the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War.