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On May 6, the Council approved the participation of the United States, Canada and Norway in the Permanent Structured Cooperation’s (PESCO) Military Mobility project. The project was launched in 2018 and commits the participating states to synchronize their national activities to be able to face the emerging “ring of fire” in the European neighbourhood with a “seamless movement of troops.”
Naturally, PESCO’s projects stem from the members of the European Union converging on certain issues. The ability to construct wider partnerships provides the 25 participating states (Denmark and Malta are not participating) with a unique window of opportunity to address their own economic, military, and industrial blind spots in the defense sector.
By Colin Barnard
In a recent article for CIMSEC, I proposed three ways to improve U.S. maritime posture in Europe, including the forward basing of small surface combatants in the Baltic and Barents Seas. Due to the Montreux Convention, however, only littoral states are able to base warships in the Black Sea, which excludes the United States and all but three NATO members: Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Recognizing this limitation and others on overall NATO maritime posture in the region, Russia has invested heavily in expanding and modernizing its Black Sea Fleet to maintain a position of relative strength in the region and ensure its unfettered access to sea lanes, which it has used in recent years to continue its destabilization of Ukraine and Georgia and resupply its forces in Syria and Libya (the latter in violation of UN sanction regimes).
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He specified that the exercise will “test NATO’s readiness and military mobility – with forces deploying across land and sea, all the way from North America to the Black Sea region and off the coast of Portugal.” The 9,000-troop, 22-nation drills, he added, will demonstrate to – Russia (he didn’t specify, nor did he need to) – “that NATO has the capabilities and the resolve to protect all Allies against any threat.”
NATO disclosed the exercise will be first large-scale test of its adapted Command Structure, with the involvement of two new NATO commands: Joint Support and Enabling Command based in Ulm, Germany and Joint Force Command Norfolk based in the American seaport city of that name. The first is designed to facilitate and expedite the transit of NATO military forces in Europe. Its role, its website states, “is to ensure seamless, swift, and secure movements of NATO forces through European NATO states.” One might add