Godfather
07-09-2016, 12:14 AM
ADUZU, Latvia — The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming!
http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2016/07/exercise_maple_resolve.jpg?w=620&quality=65&strip=all&h=465
Long before it became official Friday at the NATO leaders summit in Poland, every Latvian seemed to know that Canada is to lead a multinational NATO battalion that is to be part of a tripwire designed to check further Russian military adventurism in eastern Europe.
Canada’s first deployment of combat forces to Europe since the Cold War — revealed initially by Postmedia News — has been the most popular story for days on the Latvian state television web site.
The sprawling army base northeast of Riga the Canadians are likely to call home lies in a forest of tall red pines a few hours as the tank trundles from the Russian border. Troops guarding the gate were joyous at the news that Canadians would soon live among them. They joked that, if nothing else, the Canadians could teach this hockey-mad nation how to defeat their Russian neighbours on the ice.
“It is important to show Russia that Latvia has allies,” said businessman Aldis Thomson, who stopped while driving around the perimeter of the Aduzu base earlier this week. “It is the right action from NATO to show the world that it is ready to act against Russian confrontation.”
Asked if the Canadians would be welcomed by his countrymen, Tomsons replied, “Yes, I am sure. Absolutely sure.”
Moscow has not been nearly so welcoming of NATO’s plan to deploy 4,000 Canadian, British, German and American combat forces to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. Its foreign ministry has warned that the move “requires certain retaliatory measures which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about.”
The first of those counter-actions was revealed Tuesday, when Russia’s Interfax news agency said the Kremlin intended to place a powerful new Sunflower radar network at its bases abutting the Baltic states and Poland. The highly sensitive radars can reach out more than 300 kilometres to track aircraft and ships and can direct missiles to their targets.
A similar system will also likely be deployed against NATO on the Black Sea, the agency said.
Such tit-for-tat behaviour is an eerie echo of the military brinksmanship of the Cold War.
After several decades of almost total calm on the eastern front, NATO’s decision to up the ante by maintaining a persistent western military presence near the Russian frontier arises from Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine two years ago, the bloody civil war that his troops and agents have fomented in eastern Ukraine since then, and plans announced recently by Moscow to urgently field three army divisions comprising at least 30,000 troops in the west of the country.
Russia also moved S-350 mobile surface-to-air missile batteries close to the Polish and Lithuanian borders this spring.
With the Kremlin quietly hiding its glee, the U.S. and western Europe have been obsessed with serious domestic concerns such as electing a president, dealing with Greece’s economic crisis, a tide of mostly unwanted refugees and now the shattering consequences of Brexit.
But it is impossible to overstate how Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and Putin’s bellicose remarks about how large Russian minorities in the Baltic states — one in three Latvians is an ethnic Russian — might require help, has spooked these countries. They were famously unwilling partners in the Soviet Union until its collapse 25 years ago.
Russia already holds a hugely disproportionate military advantage in the region. Its heavily militarized enclave in Kaliningrad is only 250 kilometres north of where western leaders have gathered at the NATO summit.
That strategically important historical asterisk is home to Moscow’s Baltic fleet, as well as crack assault troops, attack helicopters, fighter jets and bombers.
Latvian foreign minister says Canadian soldiers are welcome 1:06
Russian generals routinely call snap exercises involving 80,000 troops at a time in the northwestern corner of their country. For its part, NATO put 31,000 troops from 24 countries including Canada into the field in Poland last month for Operation Anakonda.
The alliance’s nightmare scenario is a Russian invasion along a 90-kilometre stretch of rolling tank country known as the Sawalki Gap, which lies between Kaliningrad, Lithuania and Belarus, and only a little south of where the Canadian troops will make their new home.
To get an understanding of the particularly daunting military challenges facing Canada’s modest contribution to NATO’s nascent rapid response brigade, all Canadians need to know is that Globalfirepower.com, which studies such matters closely, rated Latvia the world’s 103rd most powerful fighting force (Canada was ranked 22nd).
The Latvians, who number less than two million, confront Russia with one infantry battalion (about 600 soldiers). Latvia’s army, which faces hundreds of Russian tanks, can muster three 50-year-old tanks, two of which are said to work. According to a local joke that may not be apocryphal, one of the tanks has an engine that works. The other tank has the only gun that can work.
The Latvian air force consists of four transport aircraft. As for the navy, it has 11 small coastal patrol vessels and six minesweepers that can operate in the Baltic Sea.
As the Rand Corporation revealed this spring after it war-gamed a Russian invasion of the Baltics and Poland for the Pentagon, there is nothing the Canadians or their western partners can do to slow down, let alone stop Russia from once again seizing its former territories in the west.
Rand concluded that the longest it would take for Russian tanks to be growling in Riga’s old square would be 60 hours, and that such an opening offensive would result in a “catastrophic” defeat for NATO.
Aware of this and their own bitter history with Moscow, which sent many Balts to Siberia, the Baltic states and Poland have clamoured for a forward NATO presence since Putin stirred up trouble in Ukraine. The thinking is that their presence would serve as an unequivocal warning to the Russian dictator that, if his armed forces harmed a single Canadian, American, British or German soldier, it would be immediately construed as an act of war against the entire western alliance.
Whether such measure will discourage Russia is a matter of intense discussion. But the unpalatable alternative is to deploy sufficient forces to convincingly repel a Russian attack. This would require tens of thousands of troops near the Russian border. And that would have cost tens of billions of dollars.
Given the current economic and political realities in western Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where there is almost zero desire to undertake major new military commitments, there was no chance of this happening. This much lighter, much less expensive tripwire brigade was the only other option.
The danger as more troops gather along the fault line between east and west and more warplanes populate the tiny airspace over the Baltic Sea and border areas, is that any miscalculation could provoke an incident that quickly spins out of control.
Only last week, NATO’s air-policing mission in the Baltics, which Canada will continue to contribute to, intercepted two Russian spy planes, two fighter jets and a transport aircraft in international air space. According to Lithuania’s ministry of national defence, four of the Russian aircraft did not file flight plans, had their on-board transponders turned off, and refused to communicate with air traffic controllers.
In a rare sign of equanimity, Moscow and the West have agreed to meet in Brussels next Wednesday to discuss how to safely manage their many differences.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/matthew-fisher-latvians-welcome-tiny-canadian-force-to-help-dissuade-russias-military-adventurism
http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2016/07/exercise_maple_resolve.jpg?w=620&quality=65&strip=all&h=465
Long before it became official Friday at the NATO leaders summit in Poland, every Latvian seemed to know that Canada is to lead a multinational NATO battalion that is to be part of a tripwire designed to check further Russian military adventurism in eastern Europe.
Canada’s first deployment of combat forces to Europe since the Cold War — revealed initially by Postmedia News — has been the most popular story for days on the Latvian state television web site.
The sprawling army base northeast of Riga the Canadians are likely to call home lies in a forest of tall red pines a few hours as the tank trundles from the Russian border. Troops guarding the gate were joyous at the news that Canadians would soon live among them. They joked that, if nothing else, the Canadians could teach this hockey-mad nation how to defeat their Russian neighbours on the ice.
“It is important to show Russia that Latvia has allies,” said businessman Aldis Thomson, who stopped while driving around the perimeter of the Aduzu base earlier this week. “It is the right action from NATO to show the world that it is ready to act against Russian confrontation.”
Asked if the Canadians would be welcomed by his countrymen, Tomsons replied, “Yes, I am sure. Absolutely sure.”
Moscow has not been nearly so welcoming of NATO’s plan to deploy 4,000 Canadian, British, German and American combat forces to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. Its foreign ministry has warned that the move “requires certain retaliatory measures which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about.”
The first of those counter-actions was revealed Tuesday, when Russia’s Interfax news agency said the Kremlin intended to place a powerful new Sunflower radar network at its bases abutting the Baltic states and Poland. The highly sensitive radars can reach out more than 300 kilometres to track aircraft and ships and can direct missiles to their targets.
A similar system will also likely be deployed against NATO on the Black Sea, the agency said.
Such tit-for-tat behaviour is an eerie echo of the military brinksmanship of the Cold War.
After several decades of almost total calm on the eastern front, NATO’s decision to up the ante by maintaining a persistent western military presence near the Russian frontier arises from Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine two years ago, the bloody civil war that his troops and agents have fomented in eastern Ukraine since then, and plans announced recently by Moscow to urgently field three army divisions comprising at least 30,000 troops in the west of the country.
Russia also moved S-350 mobile surface-to-air missile batteries close to the Polish and Lithuanian borders this spring.
With the Kremlin quietly hiding its glee, the U.S. and western Europe have been obsessed with serious domestic concerns such as electing a president, dealing with Greece’s economic crisis, a tide of mostly unwanted refugees and now the shattering consequences of Brexit.
But it is impossible to overstate how Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and Putin’s bellicose remarks about how large Russian minorities in the Baltic states — one in three Latvians is an ethnic Russian — might require help, has spooked these countries. They were famously unwilling partners in the Soviet Union until its collapse 25 years ago.
Russia already holds a hugely disproportionate military advantage in the region. Its heavily militarized enclave in Kaliningrad is only 250 kilometres north of where western leaders have gathered at the NATO summit.
That strategically important historical asterisk is home to Moscow’s Baltic fleet, as well as crack assault troops, attack helicopters, fighter jets and bombers.
Latvian foreign minister says Canadian soldiers are welcome 1:06
Russian generals routinely call snap exercises involving 80,000 troops at a time in the northwestern corner of their country. For its part, NATO put 31,000 troops from 24 countries including Canada into the field in Poland last month for Operation Anakonda.
The alliance’s nightmare scenario is a Russian invasion along a 90-kilometre stretch of rolling tank country known as the Sawalki Gap, which lies between Kaliningrad, Lithuania and Belarus, and only a little south of where the Canadian troops will make their new home.
To get an understanding of the particularly daunting military challenges facing Canada’s modest contribution to NATO’s nascent rapid response brigade, all Canadians need to know is that Globalfirepower.com, which studies such matters closely, rated Latvia the world’s 103rd most powerful fighting force (Canada was ranked 22nd).
The Latvians, who number less than two million, confront Russia with one infantry battalion (about 600 soldiers). Latvia’s army, which faces hundreds of Russian tanks, can muster three 50-year-old tanks, two of which are said to work. According to a local joke that may not be apocryphal, one of the tanks has an engine that works. The other tank has the only gun that can work.
The Latvian air force consists of four transport aircraft. As for the navy, it has 11 small coastal patrol vessels and six minesweepers that can operate in the Baltic Sea.
As the Rand Corporation revealed this spring after it war-gamed a Russian invasion of the Baltics and Poland for the Pentagon, there is nothing the Canadians or their western partners can do to slow down, let alone stop Russia from once again seizing its former territories in the west.
Rand concluded that the longest it would take for Russian tanks to be growling in Riga’s old square would be 60 hours, and that such an opening offensive would result in a “catastrophic” defeat for NATO.
Aware of this and their own bitter history with Moscow, which sent many Balts to Siberia, the Baltic states and Poland have clamoured for a forward NATO presence since Putin stirred up trouble in Ukraine. The thinking is that their presence would serve as an unequivocal warning to the Russian dictator that, if his armed forces harmed a single Canadian, American, British or German soldier, it would be immediately construed as an act of war against the entire western alliance.
Whether such measure will discourage Russia is a matter of intense discussion. But the unpalatable alternative is to deploy sufficient forces to convincingly repel a Russian attack. This would require tens of thousands of troops near the Russian border. And that would have cost tens of billions of dollars.
Given the current economic and political realities in western Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where there is almost zero desire to undertake major new military commitments, there was no chance of this happening. This much lighter, much less expensive tripwire brigade was the only other option.
The danger as more troops gather along the fault line between east and west and more warplanes populate the tiny airspace over the Baltic Sea and border areas, is that any miscalculation could provoke an incident that quickly spins out of control.
Only last week, NATO’s air-policing mission in the Baltics, which Canada will continue to contribute to, intercepted two Russian spy planes, two fighter jets and a transport aircraft in international air space. According to Lithuania’s ministry of national defence, four of the Russian aircraft did not file flight plans, had their on-board transponders turned off, and refused to communicate with air traffic controllers.
In a rare sign of equanimity, Moscow and the West have agreed to meet in Brussels next Wednesday to discuss how to safely manage their many differences.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/matthew-fisher-latvians-welcome-tiny-canadian-force-to-help-dissuade-russias-military-adventurism