Developing coalition security strategies within NATO has never been easy. However, it does help to have a thorough understanding of one's allies and their concerns and perspectives. This monograph provides an in-depth view of how three Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) view current and future security threats and likely problems. It also recommends some ways in which the United States might respond to these issues.
Developing coalition security strategies within NATO has never been easy. However, it does help to have a thorough understanding of one's allies and their concerns and perspectives. This monograph provides an in-depth view of how three Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) view current and future security threats and likely problems. It also recommends some ways in which the United States might respond to these issues.
Coalition operations have been an important part of U.S. warfighting in the last decade of conflict. In the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan coalition partners, especially from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations, have played an important role. Given the ongoing instability in several regions of the world, there is a strong possibility that in the near future the U.S. Armed Forces will again have to operate with allied coalition partners to help support or rebuild a country devastated by internal conflict. As the United States is likely to fight in a coalition with small allies in the future, so it is useful to understand the experience, capabilities, and perspectives of those allies. Since regaining independence in 1991, the countries of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania have been very active in supporting NATO and U.S. military operations abroad. It is notable that the three Baltic countries have also used the deployment of a significant part of their forces in the last decade as a major part of their program to carry out a major force transformation. This book analyzes the experience of the armed forces of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (all NATO allies since 2004) in their participation as U.S. and NATO coalition partners in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Baltic nations provide a useful model of how overseas deployments can support a nation's program of force transformation and development. This book also examines the frictions that have occurred in coalition deployments, especially in the areas of planning, training, logistics, and command, and offers suggestions on how some of the expected frictions might be reduced in future operations.
Developing coalition security strategies within NATO has never been easy. However, it does help to have a thorough understanding of one's allies and their concerns and perspectives. This monograph provides an in-depth view of how three Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) view current and future security threats and likely problems. It also recommends some ways in which the United States might respond to these issues.
In 2004 the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania - finalized their return to the West by joining NATO and the EU after definitively throwing off their 'captive nations' status by regaining independence in 1991. This has not, however, halted resurgent Russian revanchism in the region; given Russia's aggressive actions starting in Ukraine in 2014, defense of the Baltic has gained a new urgency and prominence. In The West's East, Lukas Milevski places the Baltic states in strategic and historical perspective. Through these nations' experiences, he sheds light on how independent states have been able to persist, despite being surrounded by predatory great powers. The work offers a deep overview of the region's history, from the indigenous Baltic tribes which populated it to the post-Cold War era, followed by recent political analogies of West-Russia relations. Analyses of today's strategic balance in the region indicate the various actors' geopolitical outlooks, strategic cultures, military capabilities, and non-military security vulnerabilities. As Milevski argues, the NATO-Russia relationship will play the major role in any potential conflict in the Baltic, but neutrals Finland and Sweden must also be factored into the strategic analysis. Using the logic of strategy he anticipates potential military interaction in the region step by step-from deterrence, to Russia's choice of offensive strategy, to area denial and NATO's return and break into the Baltic theater, and finally war termination-to determine the answer to the ultimate question: how much defense for the Baltic is enough? The West's East gives both experts and policymakers alike the background and framework for thinking strategically about a region that has re-emerged as a significant geopolitical concern in the Putin-Trump era.
Although the West won the Cold War, the continuation of the status quo is not a foregone conclusion. The former Soviet-aligned regions outside of Russia -- Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, and others -- sit atop decaying armed forces while Russian behavior has grown more and more aggressive, as evidenced by its intervention in Ukraine in recent years. Thomas Young delves into the state of these defense institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, whose resources have declined at a faster rate than their Western neighbors' due to social and fiscal circumstances at home and shifting attitudes in the wider international community. With rigorous attention to the nuances of each region's politics and policies, he documents the status of reform of these armed forces and the role that Western nations have played since the Cold War, as well as identifying barriers to success and which management practices have been most effective in both Western and Eastern capitals. This is essential reading for undergraduates and graduates studying the recent history of Europe in the post-Soviet era, as well as those professionally involved in defense governance in the region.
2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, yet even as the war slips from living memory, its legacies continue to influence current political and military thinking. This anthology will analyze these legacies for a number of countries and regions including China, Russia, the United States, the Near East, and Germany illustrating in detail how World War II is not merely a historical event, but a defining moment for current military and political thinking around the globe. This book will therefore be of interest for those interested in history, but also political and military decision makers, and followers of current political and military affairs.
Humanitarian military intervention and muscular peace operations have been partially effective in recent years in saving thousands of lives from the Balkans to Haiti to Somalia to Cambodia to Mozambique. However, success has often been mitigated by the international community's unwillingness or inability to quickly send enough forces capable of dealing with a situation decisively. In other cases, the international community has essentially stood aside as massive but possibly preventable humanitarian tragedies took place — for instance, in Angola and Rwanda in the mid-1990s and in Congo as this book goes to press. Sometimes these failures have simply been the result of an insufficient pool of available military and police forces to conduct the needed intervention or stabilization missions. In this timely new book, Michael O'Hanlon presents a blueprint for developing sufficient global intervention capacity to save many more lives with force. He contends, at least for now, that individual countries rather than the United Nations should develop the aggregate capacity to address several crises of varying scale and severity, and that many more countries should share in the effort. The United States' role is twofold: it must make slight redesigns to its own military and, even more important, encourage other nations to join it in this type of intervention, including training and support of troops in countries, such as those in Africa, that are willing to take the necessary steps to prevent humanitarian disaster but lack the resources.
The Defense Innovation Initiative (DII), begun in November 2014 by former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, is intended to ensure U.S. military superiority throughout the 21st century. The DII seeks broad-based innovation across the spectrum of concepts, research and development, capabilities, leader development, wargaming, and business practices. An essential component of the DII is the Third Offset Strategy-a plan for overcoming (offsetting) adversary parity or advantage, reduced military force structure, and declining technological superiority in an era of great power competition. This study explored the implications for the Army of Third Offset innovations and breakthrough capabilities for the operating environment of 2035-2050. It focused less on debating the merits or feasibility of individual technologies and more on understanding the implications-the second and third order effects on the Army that must be anticipated ahead of the breakthrough.
