NATO, like many of the nations it represents, was caught off guard by the coronavirus pandemic. Concerned about a potential second wave of coronavirus infections, sources told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that leaders are working on a new plan to make sure they aren’t caught off guard a second time.
As part of our Expert Briefings series, The Cipher Brief spoke recently with General Philip Breedlove (Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, about how COVID-19 has impacted NATO and what strengths and weaknesses have been exposed.
Before his retirement, General Breedlove also served as Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, as a Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, and as Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.
The Cipher Brief: General, give us a sense of what’s most on your mind as we talk about NATO and the coronavirus.
General Breedlove: I really want to talk about three primary issues: I want to talk broadly about readiness, about specific NATO impacts, and about Russia.
The issue on everyone's mind right now, and General Mark Milley spoke about it recently, is readiness. As I look across NATO, I remember that we're in a time where, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with Crimea first, and then the Donbass, we had a broad introspective period focused on our readiness and how we could respond if Russia used its military forces to cross a NATO border, like they did crossing into Ukraine. We found ourselves not where we needed to be in terms of readiness, especially as it relates to large-scale or Article 5-type actions. We were in a period in NATO where we had been doing COIN, counterinsurgency operations deployed to fix locations inside of Afghanistan, and many of the skills for a large Article 5 response had gone unattended. So, we had to refocus our entire alliance on regaining the readiness that we needed for more Article 5 type actions.
There are three categories that worry me a little bit about NATO. First, we were beginning to make progress with nations stepping up to their two percent contribution level, or at least working on plans that would reasonably get them to two percent. There is still some work to be done on that and we have to be academically honest and admit that currently not all of the countries are on board yet, but we are headed in the right direction.
Now, as a response to COVID, we face what is going to be a severe fiscal struggle for many of our NATO nations. I believe that this will translate into a struggle to hold to their plans for their defense spending, especially for some of the more challenged countries. And I think we're going to see a challenge to their ability to finance the readiness that we agreed we needed to attain, when we took a look at our relative unpreparedness to meet Russia using its military force to change internationally recognized borders, again in Europe.
The second element of readiness is, of course, people. We have soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in all of the forces of NATO being affected by this horribly contagious virus. So, just having the required number of people available to do the jobs, I believe, will be a challenge. I don't think that the peak in our military forces has been met yet. So, we need to understand that.
Third, both the US and NATO have canceled or altered major training exercises, and we will begin to lose even more training opportunities. When we lose training opportunities, the skillsets of our forces will be challenged. So, we've got to worry a little about money, we've got to worry about our people and keeping them healthy, and we've got to look at how we can continue to train in this era of COVID-19.
As it relates directly to NATO, I think budgets are going to come under pressure. Nations are going to have to make tough decisions about spending, and not only for readiness, but for recapitalization. In our Article 5 type forces, we have very few tanks ready to go, we have aircraft that are struggling for readiness, etc. And part of the answer to that challenge is recapitalization. We certainly have to invest in the static readiness of what we have, but part of that readiness is recapitalizing older, third generation and fourth-generation aircraft and tanks and ships and weapons systems and bringing them to a more ready state.
And I believe that NATO is again coming under pressure of disunity. The way different nations are handling this pandemic with pressures on their populations and the movement of their populations, and certainly with Russia trying to reach into NATO and find chinks in the armor, by ‘helping’ one nation or the other, and trying to establish a storyline of Russia being there with aid and not their fellow NATO nations being there with aid. Because of all of that, I believe that inside of NATO, we will see disunity pressures based on some of those storylines.
Finally, let's just get straight to the Russian disinformation campaign. All you have to do is google Moscow and corona, or coronavirus. And as fast as Moscow can take them down, new pieces are popping up. Whether they are good news or fake news, I cannot make any judgements at this point. What we are seeing is many reports of bad conditions in Russian hospitals, and reports of hospital administrators complaining about the fact that Russia is sending medical gear to other nations when they need it at home.
I can't speak to the veracity of any of this reporting, but I can tell you that there is reporting by reputable news sources that would lead one to believe that things may not be as rosy inside Russia as we had been led to believe. And the overtures, whether they are completely correct or not, that Russia is sending equipment out around the world to help other nations and how that plays into their own problems internally is something we're all going to have to measure. And I think that Russia is clearly in a position where they are wanting to try to say to the world, "We don't have a problem, and we the benevolent Russians will help you with your problem because you're not as well prepared as we are or not as well positioned as we are." Now, what we’re seeing in much of the Western press, is that people are beginning to get fairly factual data that points to the problem with these messages, and so we'll see that play out over the next several years.
The Cipher Brief: General Mark Milley, who you referred to earlier, recently put out a statement on LinkedIn saying, "I want to make sure everybody clearly understands that the readiness of the US military is still strong. We're still capable, and we're still ready no matter what the threat." From an outsider's perspective, just looking at how contagious this virus is, one might think the US is in a far better position to be ready because of the technology they have. They have a much larger budget to work with than NATO does. But how might NATO look post COVID?
General Breedlove: There's an upside and there's a downside. The downside is that we are going to see people and training affected. And certainly we need both. That's the conclusion we came to when Russia used its military to alter the boundaries of Ukraine in several instances. So, we have to be ready to respond to this new threat that we see out there. I do believe that we're going to have nations that are going to be challenged much more than others because they have fewer resources, less medical wherewithal, et cetera. Other nations are going to come through this a little cleaner, and some of our nations are in a situation much like I think America is in, where the military is uniquely positioned to do well as it fights its own battle with coronavirus. But as you have seen in America, the military is uniquely capable of responding to help our nation through the deployment of hospital ships, field hospitals and through the movement of goods and people. We have those skillsets that we can bring to bear to support the American people and to support our recovery. And so I believe that there are going to be pockets of good and there are going to be pockets of fairly deep challenge.
The Cipher Brief: How permanent do you think that erosion of unity will be? And what kinds of things is Russia likely to do to drive wedges in the Alliance? If Russia is weakened by the virus, will their disinformation campaign grow weaker or stronger?
General Breedlove: Clearly nations are focused on themselves right now, because we're all fighting a tough fight. I think that is going to be the case for a while. That's why we see this reaction inside of Russia, where we don't know how bad they're fighting it inside of Russia. But anecdotally, out there in the news and on the YouTubes of the world, there are cries from within asking, ‘why are we sending stuff to other nations?’ But I think you're already seeing some of the larger nations help. We're not going to sit back here in America and develop that capability to fight this and then not share it with our brothers and sisters who are challenged around the world. But I believe here on the front end, and as we are soon to reach peaks in some of these nations, we are still relatively internally focused. But as we begin to come out of it, I have a positive outlook on the idea that developed nations will begin to share their capabilities.
The Cipher Brief: With the addition of North Macedonia to NATO, the Alliance is the largest it has ever been. How much more growth in the Alliance can be accommodated without adding too much complexity or even potential disunity?
General Breedlove: It’s a really tough question, and I get a bit emotional about this. I’ve always reacted badly when people talk about NATO expansionism because I have been in many of those meetings where we’ve talked about bringing a new a nation into NATO, and it is extremely hard to get into NATO. I have said more than once in my life that Georgia — the nation of Georgia — deserves to be in NATO. No one has given more than Georgia. Per capita, they gave more soldiers than anybody. Per capita, they lost more soldiers than anybody in Afghanistan. This is a nation that has earned its stripes. So, I have watched as the Alliance has vigorously argued, and in many cases members of the Alliance, vigorously argued against bringing new nations in.
There is this feeling out there that NATO's trying to land grab and bring people in and make itself bigger. And the actual things that I saw from inside those meetings was more like the hand of stop rather than the hand to come.
The Cipher Brief: I want to give you the chance to offer some closing thoughts.
General Breedlove: I want to first pass a note of encouragement. I'm watching our nation as it fights one of the toughest fights it has ever been in and I am reminded every day, and I don't mean this in a mean-spirited way, but it's not governments and politicians that are going to win this war in America against COVID. It's Americans. It’s the American people, not Democratic people, not Republican people, but Americans. This is a fight where our American spirit will win out over all of these institutions, that left to their own devices, would probably fail the test. I'm encouraged because of what Americans are doing and how they're doing it.
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