Rebalancing European Joint Fires to Deter Russia

Conventional deterrence of Russian aggression in the Euro-Atlantic area requires a demonstrable NATO capacity to defeat Russian ground force incursions within politically acceptable timeframes. In the context of increasingly strained transatlantic relations and US prioritisation of the Indo-Pacific – where deterrence of a war over Taiwan is strongly in the interests of European NATO, and the US military is increasingly overstretched – European NATO members need to demonstrate that they can deter conventional aggression by Russian forces.

NATO land forces are overwhelmingly dependent on air power for fires. Without large-scale US assistance, however, European air forces would currently struggle to roll back dense and integrated air defence systems (IADS) such as those protecting Russian forces. Accelerating the degradation of the Russian IADS in any conflict is therefore critical to enabling the defeat of Russian ground forces. This is increasingly a joint task, and therefore this paper considers the issues of land-air integration in achieving the suppression and destruction of enemy (Russian) air defences (SEAD/DEAD). 

Recommendations

This paper gives several recommendations for NATO’s European members that would help make this realisable:

• Many complex command and control (C2) challenges emerge from the need for an inter-echelon and joint SEAD/DEAD campaign, for which there is currently no suitable platform for training and thus testing requirements. Joint NATO SEAD/DEAD exercises are therefore needed, with the design of appropriate Alliance C2, a critical exploitation activity.
   
• European air forces should invest in the production of stand-off weapons suitable for SEAD/DEAD campaigns. Specifically, these include the American AGM-88G Extended Range Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile, or potentially the Norwegian AGM-184A Joint Strike Missile, or the British SPEAR and SPEAR-EW cruise missiles. The latter three are especially important, as they can be manufactured in Europe. Air forces should also invest in greater stockpiles of the GBU-39/B small diameter bomb for affordable stand-off mass, and in aerial decoys such as the ADM-160 MALD or equivalents: both can force the Russian IADS to waste missiles, and provide saturation effects to enable other weapons to get through to targets. Another option is the GBU-53/B Stormbreaker II, which can automatically hit moving targets, but is significantly more expensive than the GBU-39/B and is highly vulnerable to interception due to it being a slow-flying glide bomb.
   
• For offensive counter-air capabilities to support a SEAD/DEAD campaign and provide cover to ground forces, European countries should invest in increasing stockpiles of METEOR long-range air-to-air missiles to improve the combat effectiveness of existing fourth-generation platforms such as Typhoon, Rafale and Gripen when these are forced to remain a significant distance from front lines.
   
• Land forces should prioritise fielding corps artillery groups of rocket artillery and bringing divisional artillery groups of general support howitzers up to strength. Stockpiles of precision strike missiles, the US Army Tactical Missile System and the Extended Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System–Extended Range should be prioritised, with a particular emphasis on manufacture of a European munition at scalable cost that can be launched from the M270 or M142 HIMARS launchers. Priority munitions natures include submunitions, thermobaric and sensor-fuzed payloads. These natures are critical to efficiently engaging ground targets on a battlefield where it is becoming harder to concentrate and sustain a large number of firing pieces. However, to be able to purchase and use many key submunitions payloads for SEAD/DEAD targets, and to attrit Russian ground forces in the open, European NATO members would need to withdraw from the Convention on Cluster Munitions (as Lithuania already has).
   
• There is significant advantage in investing in loitering munitions, one-way attack munitions, and aerial decoys that can be launched from land to suppress, stimulate and strike air defence systems. In combination with a reorganisation of traditional artillery capabilities, the deployment of hunter-killer and loitering top-attack UAS should also be able to help compensate for the close air support (CAS) that would not be generally available to ground forces until the SEAD/DEAD campaign was well advanced. In all cases, however, these uncrewed assets need to remain cheap and easy to produce in large numbers to have the effects described. They are a potent lethality multiplier for traditional fires and air-delivered weapons, rather than a substitute.
   
• Investment in significantly increasing the long-range precision fires stocks of European air, maritime and land forces is a prerequisite for rapidly generating a credible capability to degrade and ultimately roll back the Russian IADS. It is also vital for providing sufficient lethality to enable ground forces to survive until SEAD/DEAD operations have degraded the IADS to a point where more traditional CAS missions become possible again. However, investment in long-range precision munitions is not sufficient on its own. Europe must also develop electronic attack, special operations forces and orbital ISR capabilities to replace the critical joint enablers for SEAD/DEAD operations currently only provided by the US.