ZAPAD-2021, a major weeklong Russian military exercise, got underway on Thursday. Joined by Belarus, the exercise claims to test responses to a NATO-led military and terrorist attack on Belarus.
In reality, the exercise has three other purposes. First, to improve the Russian military’s ability to conduct combined arms operations at scale. Second, to deter future Western action against Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. And third, to provide propaganda for Vladimir Putin’s increasingly paranoid government.
NATO is monitoring the exercise, especially with regards to Russia’s Northern Fleet and its nuclear ballistic missile and attack submarine forces. Russian submarine activity has escalated dramatically in both scale and capability in recent years. It is likely that U.S. (and possibly British and French) attack submarines are silently surveilling this Russian activity under the Barents Sea.
But there’s another takeaway from ZAPAD-21. Namely, it’s proof that the United States continues to bear an outsize provision of NATO’s defense.
This is most obvious in terms of NATO air activity monitoring Russian forces in the Kaliningrad Oblast. According to air traffic monitoring websites, since ZAPAD-21 began, NATO surveillance flights near Kaliningrad have been dominated by U.S. military aircraft. Squished between the Baltic Sea and NATO member states Poland and Lithuania, Kaliningrad is an effective Russian military fortress. Russian aircraft from Kaliningrad regularly test NATO’s air defense capabilities, sometimes successfully. But the question remains: Why aren’t more NATO member states deploying their forces?
NATO is one of the most successful alliances in history, providing great utility to America. NATO allies such as Britain, Norway, the Baltic states (Latvia and Lithuania currently have a number of warships on patrol in the Baltic Sea), and Poland (considering offensive resolve, also France) help bear the burden. Yet, ZAPAD zaps our attention back to the basic point: Why aren’t the Belgian, Danish, French, and German air forces operating closer and more often to Kaliningrad? Why, for that matter, isn’t the Italian military operating closer to the Russians in the Mediterranean? It is absurd that tiny Luxembourg provides an inordinate amount of the airborne warning capability over central Europe, for example.
This operational lethargy wears particularly thin when it comes to Germany. Whatever the Biden administration might claim, Germany is as much an ally of Russia as it is NATO. It is more an enabler of China’s genocidal imperialism than it is a beacon of European democratic values. It is a nation where the Green Party is tougher on China and Russia than either of the major center-left or center-right parties!
The simple truth remains the oldest: NATO is nothing without America, and the Russians know it.
The Europeans need to invest more in operational capabilities and do more in support of NATO’s defense. If not, they risk a future American president disdainfully noticing the preponderance of U.S. military aircraft defending Europe’s airspace and concluding that true allies wouldn’t rely on American risk-taking so as to avoid it themselves.
