NATO has rewritten its answer to a Russian attack to include striking military and industrial targets far inside Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 3. The alliance’s senior officers met in June for its “first-ever Deep Strike Symposium,” hosted by Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, on “a topic few attendees would have openly addressed until recently.” Where NATO’s defense of Europe was for decades “the military equivalent of putting up roadblocks,” its strategists now hold that deterrence requires “denial": “not just blasting troops that might pour across borders, but also hitting military bases, supply depots and industrial facilities behind the front line, on Russia’s home ground.” (emphasis added)
Grynkewich laid it out in a Warsaw speech on his “theory of victory”: NATO would block the first wave of an attack and if the offensive continued, “we will break the warfighting system engaged against us” by hitting the advancing forces and “anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.” The Journal adds that “escalating to nuclear weapons isn’t in the strategy.” Targets would include “Russia’s industrial facilities, critical infrastructure and resource bases that lie thousands of miles from NATO borders”; the model is Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries and factories, and “an approach the U.S. deployed against Iran this year.” Polish Maj. Gen. Ireneusz Nowak: “We definitely would want to strike the defense-industrial base,” and “we need to treat deep precision strike as deterrence.”
The plan is also a procurement program. The U.S. is extending its Tomahawk and ATACMS inventories; European allies are “racing” to build stocks of Storm Shadow, SCALP and Taurus, with at least 48 new cruise-missile projects announced, many of which, says missile researcher Fabian Hoffmann, “won’t materialize.” Plans like Grynkewich’s “aim to make deep-strike attacks essentially automatic following a Russian military attack.” Nowak’s version of the message to Moscow: “Don’t do anything stupid, because we can punish you.”
The report appeared two days before the Federation of American Scientists documented the doubling of active nuclear weapons shelters on NATO’s northern flank (see our report, and in the week Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby met President Dan in Bucharest on regional security and U.S. negotiators discussed permanent bases in Warsaw.
