Can Russia win a war against NATO?

Hello,

This is my first post on Logic of War. I am looking forward to contributing.
In this first post, I discuss whether Russia can win a war against NATO. It is not a detailed look at the capabilities, but rather a discussion about what one needs to consider, and especially why it would be a mistake to be overconfident that NATO could easily handle such a challenge.

Sincerely,
Alexander

By Alexander With

The question of whether Russia can win a war against NATO is being hotly debated at the moment. Unfortunately, many give an overly binary answer: yes or no. However, Clausewitz has taught us that war is an uncertain affair, which can be difficult to predict in advance.

Any expert should therefore approach the question with a degree of humility regarding their ability to forecast accurately. This is not least because several significantly different scenarios are at play. How involved is the USA, for example? Is NATO united? What is China doing? Are Russia's war aims to annex territory, or merely to showcase NATO's Article 5 as a hollow shell? What role do nuclear weapons play?

Questions like these fundamentally change the premises of what such a war would look like. Most agree that Russia is unlikely to win against NATO as long as the alliance is strong and united—and that Russia is unlikely to start a war in the first place if its perception is that NATO is united.

The word perception is important. Russia may underestimate NATO's cohesion, just as it underestimated Ukraine’s. A dangerous scenario could be one where Russia underestimated NATO’s willingness to defend itself, while NATO underestimated the Russian risk willingness. Such dynamics led to the soviet hybrid attack on Estonia in 1924. It is therefore important for NATO’s deterrence that it signals both the willingness and the ability to defend itself.

Another question is how the military balance of power would look under different scenarios. Here, we tend to measure the wrong parameters. GDP is what so-called experts often turn to in order to measure strength. But GDP—or defense budgets, for that matter—only say something about the potential for combat power. They don't say much about actual combat power. For example, Finland's and Denmark's defense budgets are not very different, but while Denmark aims to build a single brigade within the coming years, Finland already has seven, along with hundreds of thousands of reservists.

Counting the number of soldiers, tanks, or aircraft doesn't tell us much either, unless one also considers the ability to transport them to the front and keep them supplied. Geography matters, and the farther one has to project combat power, the larger the required support structure becomes.

Beyond logistics, another vital part of this support structure is the so-called enablers—capabilities that are needed to generate effect from the rest of your forces. These include air refueling, intelligence, communication systems, long-range weapons, electronic warfare, etc. They create synergy between what would otherwise be more or less randomly deployed capabilities. This is where Europe has a problem: while it has plenty of tanks, fighter jets, and soldiers on paper, it is largely the Americans who possess the enablers that Europe depends on to effectively employ its forces.

Ultimately, the most significant parameter when it comes to assessing the balance of power is what military professionals call relative combat power in terrain. That is: which side can deploy the most combat-ready military units (e.g., brigades) where they need to fight, keep them supplied and supported with the necessary capabilities, and create synergy among different units. This is not an easy parameter to measure, as it is much more qualitative than quantitative.

As a result, we often see that the media and certain would-be experts focus on more superficial parameters such as “defense budgets” or “number of tanks in NATO”. It is important however, to compare actual military strength, to answer the question whether or not Russia could win a war against NATO.

In doing so, the answer would probably be “it depends”. Against a strong and united NATO, Russia would almost certainly lose. But in any other scenario, things might get more blurry.

About the author:

Alexander With is commander (OF-3) in the Royal Danish Navy and military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College. His website is https://www.alexanderwith.dk