A fact about NATO that to me seems to go strangely elided in the discussion: the alliance has plenty more countries in it than just the US and the Baltics. US clearly has strongest single military, but even if assuming maximal US waffling and vagueness, any threats againt NATO members are still held in check also by, for starters, pretty much the entirety of Western Europe.

That’s fair, but I believe the United States has advantages in procurement, development, and air support, larger reserves of manpower and materiel, and more military experience than the Europeans. 

In a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia, I believe only the Americans have the combined arms forces with the military superiority to roll back Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic states.

The United States has about 14,000 military aircraft, while Russia has 3,800. But the principal allies together have fewer aircraft than that: France has 1,300, Britain has 850, and Germany has 700. 

Even if qualitative and personnel superiority allow the smaller allied forces to fight Russia to a draw – and the Russians will have combat experience that allies lack – I’m skeptical that Europeans will have the air superiority they need to advance on the ground.

On the ground, the United States has about 5,900 tanks and 41,000 armored fighting vehicles. Russia has about 20,000 tanks and 31,000 AFVs. The Europeans have fewer than that: France has about 400 tanks and 6,900 AFVs, Britain has about 250 tanks and 6,000 AFVs, and Germany has about 550 tanks and 5,900 AFVs.

I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate those military numbers, but the Europeans are not prepared to fight and win a ground war against Russia without air superiority, and I don’t know how long it would take the Europeans to procure the materiel and manpower to reverse Russian gains. 

They would need that, because Russia will have an enormous military advantage at the beginning of the war. NATO runs war games, and the outcome isn’t happy, even with US and European allies working together:

Across multiple plays of the game, Russian forces eliminated or bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities. Four factors appeared to contribute most substantially to this result.

First and obviously, the overall correlation of forces was dramatically in Russia’s favor. Although the two sides’ raw numbers of maneuver battalions—22 for Russia and 12 for NATO—are not badly disproportionate, seven of NATO’s are those of Estonia and Latvia, which are extremely light, lack tactical mobility, and are poorly equipped for fighting against an armored opponent. Indeed, the only armor in the NATO force is the light armor in a single Stryker battalion, which is credited with having deployed from Germany during the crisis buildup prior to the conflict. NATO has no main battle tanks in the field.

Meanwhile, all Russia’s forces are motorized, mechanized, or tank units. Even their eight airborne battalions are equipped with light armored vehicles, unlike their U.S. counterparts.

Second, Russia also enjoys an overwhelming advantage in tactical and operational fires. The Russian order of battle includes ten artillery battalions (three equipped with tube artillery and seven with multiple-rocket launchers), in addition to the artillery that is organic to the maneuver units themselves. NATO has no independent fires units at all, and the light units involved in the fight are poorly endowed with organic artillery.

Third, NATO’s light forces were not only outgunned by the much heavier Russian units, but their lack of maneuver ability meant that they could be pinned and bypassed if the Russian players so desired. By and large, NATO’s infantry found themselves unable even to retreat successfully and were destroyed in place.

Finally, while NATO airpower was generally able to take a substantial toll on advancing Russian troops, without adequate NATO ground forces to slow the attack’s momentum, there is simply not enough time to inflict sufficient attrition to halt the assault. Airpower is rate limited, and against a moderately competent adversary—which is how we portrayed the Russian Air Force—NATO’s air forces had multiple jobs to do, including suppressing Russia’s arsenal of modern surface-to-air defenses and defending against possible air attacks on NATO forces and rear areas. This further limited NATO air’s ability to affect the outcome of the war on the ground. Without heavy NATO ground forces to force the attackers to slow their rate of advance and assume postures that increased their vulnerability to air strikes, Russian players could meter their losses to air by choosing how to array and move their forces.

Russia’s tactical advantages make victory in the Baltics a fait accompli. That means that Europeans can only make victory in a protracted campaign, and I am deeply skeptical that the Europeans are willing to go it alone. I’m not even sure they’d be willing to do it with American help. 

European electorates outside the Russian borderlands are also deeply skeptical of military action, even in defense. Only 18 percent of Germans, 27 percent of Britons, and 29 percent of the French are willing to fight for their country. The French and British establishments believe in the alliance, but I’m skeptical that the deeply pacifist German electorate is prepared for conflict.

If there were a political solution available – supposing the Russians install an amenable client government in the Baltic states, and offer a compromise peace with the Western Europeans – I am not certain that the Germans would hold out for something more.

Without Germany, without the United States, and with the Baltic states already under Russian occupation, I don’t think the Atlantic alliance has a leg to stand on, even if the Balts and Poles put up a heroic resistance. Even with the Americans and the Germans, the Russian fait accompli in the Baltics presents the allies with hard choices, as RAND points out:

A rapid Russian occupation of all or much of one or two NATO member states would present the Alliance with three options, all unappetizing. First, NATO could mobilize forces for a counteroffensive to eject Russian forces from Latvia and Estonia and restore the territorial integrity of the two countries. Under the best of circumstances, this would require a fairly prolonged buildup that could stress the cohesion of the alliance and allow Russia opportunities to seek a political resolution that left it in possession of its conquests. Even a successful counteroffensive would almost certainly be bloody and costly and would have political consequences that are unforeseeable in advance but could prove dramatic.

Any counteroffensive would also be fraught with severe escalatory risks. If the Crimea experience can be taken as a precedent, Moscow could move rapidly to formally annex the occupied territories to Russia. NATO clearly would not recognize the legitimacy of such a gambit, but from Russia’s perspective it would at least nominally bring them under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella. By turning a NATO counterattack aimed at liberating the Baltic republics into an “invasion” of “Russia,” Moscow could generate unpredictable but clearly dangerous escalatory dynamics. 

On a tactical level, a counteroffensive campaign into the Baltics would likely entail the desire, and perhaps even the necessity, of striking targets, such as long-range surface-to-air defenses and surface-to-surface fires systems, in territory that even NATO would agree constitutes “Russia.” Under Russian doctrine, it is unclear what kinds or magnitudes of conventional attacks into Russian territory might trigger a response in kind (or worse), but there would certainly be concern in Washington and other NATO capitals about possible escalatory implications.

Finally, it is also unclear how Russia would react to a successful NATO counteroffensive that threatened to decimate the bulk of its armed forces along its western frontier; at what point would tactical defeat in the theater begin to appear like a strategic threat to Russia herself? 

The second option would be for NATO to turn the escalatory tables, taking a page from its Cold War doctrine of “massive retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied. This option was a core element of the Alliance’s strategy against the Warsaw Pact for the duration of the latter’s existence and could certainly be called on once again in these circumstances. 

The deterrent impact of such a threat draws power from the implicit risk of igniting an escalatory spiral that swiftly reaches the level of nuclear exchanges between the Russian and U.S. homelands. Unfortunately, once deterrence has failed—which would clearly be the case once Russia had crossed the Rubicon of attacking NATO member states—that same risk would tend to greatly undermine its credibility, since it may seem highly unlikely to Moscow that the United States would be willing to exchange New York for Riga. Coupled with the general direction of U.S. defense policy, which has been to de-emphasize the value of nuclear weapons, and the likely unwillingness of NATO’s European members, especially the Baltic states themselves, to see their continent or countries turned into a nuclear battlefield, this lack of believability makes this alternative both unlikely and unpalatable.

The third possibility would be to concede, at least for the near to medium term, Russian control of the territory they had occupied. Under this scenario, the best outcome would likely be a new cold war, with the 21st century’s version of the old “inner German border” drawn somewhere across Lithuania or Latvia. The worst be would be the collapse of NATO itself and the crumbling of the cornerstone of Western security for almost 70 years. 

If the Americans believe they must “trade New York for Tallinn,” or Rostock for Riga, or Calais for Kaunas, or Hampstead for Helsinki, I’m not sure they’d be willing to make the trade. So I’m a bit concerned. Yes, I’m a bit concerned about this, that, and the other thing, about events that might precipitate this eventuality, or perhaps something worse.

Americans and Europeans both might decide to “respect Russia’s interests in its traditional sphere of influence,” whatever that might mean for their six million Baltic allies. 

Who would even notice?