By Colin Barnard 

In July 2020, senior U.S. military leaders announced a realignment of the U.S. strategic posture in Europe, projecting the movement of troops and materiel from various locations in Germany to elsewhere in Europe and back to the United States. General Tod Wolters, commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), argued the realignment enhances deterrence against Russia. Conversely, a former commander of EUCOM and SHAPE, retired Admiral Jim Stavridis, called the realignment a “victory for Putin.” 

With President Biden’s defense team set to review the realignment during the 120-day period granted under the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it is worth evaluating, which, if either, of the above statements is correct. I argue that the planned realignment should go forward, but only if it includes improvements to the U.S. maritime posture, including: additional forward basing for U.S. warships, better collaboration with NATO on maritime domain awareness, and more U.S. foreign area officers embedded in the NATO command and force structures.

The Benefits of Realignment

The potential benefits of the planned realignment should be easy for the Biden team to identify. Relocating EUCOM headquarters from Germany to near SHAPE’s headquarters in Belgium would, as General Wolters stated, “improve the speed and clarity of…decision making and promote greater operational alignment” of U.S. and NATO forces. Currently, General Wolters has to fly between these two headquarters just to address his staffs in person. While this is merely an inconvenience in peacetime, it is an unnecessary burden that could be dangerous during crisis or conflict.

Another benefit is the movement of air forces from Germany to Italy, closer to their parent headquarters and in a better position for operations across the Black Sea region and the Mediterranean. Russia’s continued presence in Ukraine, Georgia, and Syria, and its expanding footprint in Libya, warrant attention from both U.S. and NATO forces in Europe and highlight the need to think beyond the traditional notion of a front line with Russia that only faces eastward. 

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the realignment, however, is the movement of 1,000 troops to Poland, raising the total U.S. troop presence there to 5,500. Defense cooperation between the United States and Poland—a key NATO ally that borders the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and the infamous Suwalki Gap, and has an important coastline on the Baltic Sea—is crucial for deterring Russia. Additionally, the United States has recently improved on defense cooperation agreements with Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and Georgia. 

Along with these bilateral agreements, Biden’s team should also consider NATO’s collective deterrence efforts—for example, two forward presence initiatives implemented by NATO in 2016, which placed four battalion-sized battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. 

What is still inadequate in U.S. bilateral and NATO deterrence efforts, however, is the maritime domain. Deterrence and defense against Russia require more than just ground troops. It is a multi-domain effort requiring significant maritime forces.

The Maritime Domain

Russia is first and foremost a land power, but it is increasingly focused on naval modernization and stand-off capabilities designed to challenge the international order at sea, and neither the United States nor NATO are keeping pace. Fortunately, the most recent U.S. maritime strategy acknowledges this reality and emphasizes the importance of U.S. maritime presence and power projection to compete with Russia. Surprisingly, however, the realignment does not call for a fixed number of U.S. maritime assets in Europe, nor for additional forward naval bases to support them.

The realignment does not entail any reduction in U.S. maritime presence either, which is actually anticipated to increase in the near future—most notably via two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers joining the four already stationed in Rota, Spain. These destroyers, along with NATO’s Standing Naval Forces, are at the forefront of daily competition with Russia in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas. But the realignment does not address the remaining inadequacies of the U.S. maritime posture in Europe, something the Biden team now has time to correct. 

Before noting these inadequacies, it is worth mentioning that NATO members are making significant strides to improve their naval forces, and the United States has increased its naval deployments in support of NATO objectives, leading Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 for all of 2019, sailing its forward-deployed destroyers regularly into the Black Sea to reassure NATO allies and partners, and, most recently, sailing three destroyers into the Barents Sea for the first time since the end of the Cold War. 

Last year, retired Admiral James Foggo, former commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, highlighted the challenge Russia poses in the maritime domain, indicating that more remains to be done. The European theater needs more U.S. naval forces, for which the realignment should account. While the Biden team should and will seek a broad range of input regarding the realignment, three recommendations for addressing the currently inadequate U.S. maritime posture in Europe are included below.

Recommendations

1. Forward Basing 

The Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas are areas of increasing naval competition with Russia, but U.S. naval forces can only access the first two via chokepoints, and all three lie far away from existing U.S. naval bases and logistical sites. While it is important for NATO member and partner states bordering these bodies of water to improve their own naval forces, the forward basing of U.S. naval forces nearby, specifically small surface combatants (such as the future Constellation-class frigate), would yield the United States and NATO important advantages over Russia.

First, forward-based U.S. surface forces would be able to develop sufficient interoperability with NATO allies and partner naval forces operating in the Black, Baltics, and Barents Seas, which is critical for integrating as one force during crisis or conflict. Outside of crisis or conflict, this interoperability is important for the United States and NATO to perform low-end maritime security tasks necessary for maintaining “good order at sea,” identified by Joshua Tallis at the Center for Naval Analyses and the new U.S. maritime strategy as a central part to winning strategic competition. 

Second, the logistical sites required to sustain forward-based forces would be critical during a crisis or conflict. Existing U.S. logistical sites, such as those in Spain, Italy, and Crete, lie too far from these bodies of water, and supplying forces within them would require transit via potentially contested chokepoints. Forward-based forces able to fight on day one, and sustain the fight with nearby logistical sites, would be a credible deterrent against Russia. These forces would be well poised to shape the maritime battlespace, protect sea lines of communication, and keep chokepoints open.

While forward basing would be possible in or close to the Baltic and Barents Seas, the Montreux Convention prevents the United States and any other non-littoral state from permanently stationing naval forces in the Black Sea. Nevertheless, much could be done to improve the maritime posture in the Black Sea short of forward basing U.S. naval forces there. One particularly creative idea proposed by Luke Coffey of The Heritage Foundation is for Danubian states such as Germany to sail warships for longer durations in the Black Sea using the Danube River to reset the time limits of Montreux, and potentially for non-Danubian states to do the same using the Danube-Black Sea Canal.

2. Maritime Domain Awareness

U.S. maritime domain awareness (MDA) in Europe also requires improvement. Defined as “the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States,” global MDA requires significant collaboration among allies and partners, but currently even regional collaboration on MDA within NATO is inadequate. An exhaustive list of recommendations designed to improve U.S. collaboration with NATO is beyond the scope of this article, but two specific suggestions are worth noting.

First, the United States and NATO need to identify and acquire the capabilities required for effective MDA of the European theater as an alliance. Collaboration is only possible if those collaborating have the capabilities to do so. These capabilities need not only be military, though military platforms are certainly a crucial part of MDA. Commercial services and open-source methods for tracking vessels of interest at sea—ideally that avoid national classification issues, which often prevent effective intelligence sharing—are also needed. 

Second, the United States and NATO need to establish a more direct link to events at sea instead of relying on maritime fusion centers (MFCs), which are agencies and processes designed to connect commercial and governmental maritime actors. While crucial for collating and disseminating information related to safety and security incidents, such as search and rescue or piracy, MFCs are only as good as the information they receive. One way to establish a more direct link to the biggest maritime actor of all—merchant vessels—is through the states and organizations that flag and insure them, such as Norway and the Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association. 

Among the many services the association offers its 453 members, encompassing 3,391 merchant vessels and offshore rigs, are intelligence reports generated by its Intelligence and Operations Center (IOC) after a security incident occurs. Some of the first and most accurate intelligence available after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked merchant vessels in 2019 came from the IOC, as Norwegian-flagged vessels were damaged in two of the attacks. Though the Norwegian example is perhaps unique, identifying and developing voluntary linkages with similar organizations across Europe would go a long way to improve U.S. and NATO MDA.

3. Foreign Area Officers

Finally, U.S. Navy foreign area officers (FAOs) should be better utilized to synergize U.S. bilateral and NATO capacity building and deterrence efforts in the maritime domain. FAOs are the U.S. military’s international engagement professionals, working across the globe in U.S. embassies, military headquarters, and on battlefields to develop and maintain critical relationships with allies and partners, to include facilitating defense and security cooperation agreements. While every branch of the U.S. military has FAOs assigned to the NATO alliance, the U.S. Navy should dedicate more. 

NATO as an organization relies on bilateral agreements between individual NATO members and key partners such as Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and Georgia to build capacity and improve its deterrence posture in the maritime domain. However, a gap in information sharing exists between the predominantly non-American officers at NATO and their American counterparts, even though they are all working on engagements with the same partners. While the details of finalized U.S. bilateral agreements eventually make their way to NATO, the lack of real-time synchronization severely impedes NATO efforts to plan and exercise based on these agreements. 

The simplest solution to bridge this gap is to embed more U.S. Navy FAOs within the NATO command and force structures. In the command structure, U.S. Navy FAOs are already present at two of NATO’s joint force commands, but NATO’s theater maritime command does not have a single U.S. Navy FAO on staff. In the force structure, Navy FAOs could be attached to European maritime headquarters that are capable of providing the maritime component command for the NATO Response Forces in the event of crisis or conflict. Adding more FAOs to the line officers (e.g., surface, aviation, submarine, etc.) already at these headquarters would provide more regional focus and expertise than line officers alone.

These NATO-focused FAOs would not work alongside a country team in a U.S. embassy or contributing to strategic and operational planning at a U.S. military headquarters, but they would gain valuable experience in support of European national and NATO exercises, operations, and planning groups, which would pay dividends when serving in traditional FAO billets. Though spread across the European theater, these FAOs would interact with each other regularly during exercises and at workshops and meetings. They would be a vast network into which American Embassies and the U.S. EUCOM, 2nd Fleet, and 6th Fleet headquarters could tap at any time. 

Conclusion

U.S. military presence in Europe continues to be necessary, but what that presence looks like, and where it is, should always be subject to reassessment. Security environments are not static, nor are the threats within them. During its review of the realignment, Biden’s team should keep a multi-domain focus when determining the right mix of forces forward deployed in Europe while taking into account existing NATO deterrence initiatives and the challenges posed by Russia at sea. 

A U.S. strategic posture realignment in Europe should go forward as long as the U.S. maritime posture in Europe improves as a result. Increasing forward basing for U.S. warships, collaborating better with NATO on MDA, and embedding more U.S. FAOs in the NATO command and force structures will enhance deterrence against Russia even more than General Wolters stated. Contrary to Admiral Stavridis’ statement, it would be a nightmare for Putin rather than a victory.

Colin Barnard is a U.S. Navy foreign area officer currently in training for an exchange with the German Navy. He was formerly a staff operations and plans officer at NATO Maritime Command in the U.K. In addition to publishing for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings and the Center for International Maritime Security, he is a PhD student at King’s College London with a focus on European maritime security. The views expressed in this publication are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. Defense Department or U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: NATO Standing Maritime Groups operating in the Mediterranean (NATO)

By Sebastian Bruns 

Part of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and U.S. European Command, the Sixth Fleet is the principal organizing body for American naval activities in and around Europe. In 2020, the United States Sixth Fleet, one of three numbered fleets designated specifically for American forward naval presence, celebrated its 70th anniversary. U.S. naval presence in Europe goes even further back than that. In the early 19th century, the Barbary pirates of Northern Africa constituted one of the pivotal founding memories for the American sea services. U.S. presence in the region continued over the centuries. In 1946, President Harry Truman dispatched the battleship USS Missouri to Turkey in a show of force in the emerging post-World War II order. 

The Sixth Fleet area of responsibility includes, inter alia, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea. It also includes the eastern Atlantic Ocean, although that responsibility is shared with the recently reactivated U.S. Second Fleet based in Norfolk, Virginia. Additionally, Sixth Fleet operations from Naples, Italy, cover vast stretches of the African coast, excluding those that are part of the area of responsibility of the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Manama, Bahrain. 

The Fifth Fleet and the third forward-based establishment, the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, have been the subjects of official naval history publications.¹ These explore the history of American institutionalized naval activity in the region in question and provide policy-makers a grasp on the opportunities for and challenges to U.S. naval forward presence. The Sixth Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Europe are conspicuously absent from that canon.

In fairness, the Sixth Fleet suffered a significant downgrade of geostrategic significance after 1991. With the demise of the Soviet Navy and American political interest shifting first to troop reduction and then to other areas of the world, Europe became somewhat of a secondary operating theatre. This is not to say that the U.S. Navy and its allies did not field substantial maritime assets for crises and armed conflicts such as Operations Desert Storm (1991), Sharp Guard in the Adriatic (1993-1995), and Odyssey Dawn in Libya (2011). 

In Northern Europe, maritime operations that had been a cornerstone of the 1980s maritime strategy all but ceased. Illustratively, American naval commitment to the annual exercise Baltic Operations – or Baltops – waxed and waned.² For the American public and its naval planners, the Persian Gulf and the Taiwan Strait featured much higher on the agenda than operating areas around the European peninsula. 

In line with the changing international security environment, American troop presence in Europe was significantly reduced. At the same time, most European countries also massively decreased the size, and often the capabilities, of their armed forces. The objective: cashing in on an assumed “peace dividend” and reflecting the changing character of armed conflict they confronted. Instead of Soviet submarines or Warsaw Pact amphibious forces, it was the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency land wars of the 2000s that occupied American and European planners’ minds. European navies often bore the brunt of the cutbacks and resource allocations involved and are only slowly recovering.³

However, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war in Eastern Ukraine, the disintegrating Middle East with the Syrian civil war, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, and widespread instability in all of Northern Africa coupled with sea-borne mass migration and refugees are just some of the significant developments of the 2010s that have thrust Europe – and the importance of the U.S. Sixth Fleet – back on center stage of international security politics. Russian undersea activity in the Mediterranean and on the northern flank is creating massive headaches for those who engage in the somewhat lost art of anti-submarine warfare. The Baltic Sea region is now considering Crimean scenarios in its backyard. 

The strategic geography of Europe has evolved, but so has the Russian naval posture thanks to Russia’s embrace of hybrid or gray-zone tactics. To make matters even more challenging, China has significantly upped its influence on Europe. Beijing promises economic benefits by way of digitalization and its Belt and Road Initiative. Critical European maritime infrastructure has also been in the focus of Chinese state-owned businesses, and the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is making regular port calls to European waters. It also conducts naval exercises with the Russian Navy in the Baltic and Black Seas.⁴

Finally, another significant problem stems from within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) itself. Alliance coherence has suffered over the years from diverging interests in member states, competition for influence, lackluster defense spending, and those global challenges that defy traditional nation-state capacities: migration, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. American troop presence, and the reduction thereof, was used as a bargaining chip by President Donald Trump as recently as 2020 in order to punish Germany and to reward other member states.

This goes to show how little the importance of American military presence in Europe is understood on either side of the Atlantic. This is particularly the case for U.S. naval forces that have quietly gone about expanding their forward presence and rotational deployments. Still, comparatively little literature exists in the public domain about American naval engagement in and with Europe. An official, unclassified history of the Sixth Fleet would go a long way to provide policy-makers and the public with information about the bigger picture of naval cooperation and U.S. Navy activities in Europe. 

It would also be immensely helpful for those defense specialists in Europe that seek to work with the incoming Biden/Harris administration. After all, the annual Baltops exercise has seen a significant uptick in U.S. Navy visibility (the 2019 maneuver was commanded by Vice Admiral Andrew Lewis, Commander, U.S. Second Fleet), but American naval presence is rarely contextualized or studied. Four ballistic missile defense destroyers of the Arleigh-Burke-class are now forward-stationed in Rota, Spain, complemented by Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland. These trends, as well as those adverse challenges described above, are likely to continue in one form or another. 

It is highly unlikely that this year, 75 years after the Missouri’s trip to Turkey, will be commemorated with a similar U.S. naval deployment – due to the absence of battleships in the American warship inventory, the raging pandemic, and the divide in Turkish-American and Turkish-NATO relations in the wake of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s politics. It should, however, signal the start to an honest effort conceptualizing American naval presence and seapower in Europe. It is as important for Americans as it is for Europeans.     

Dr. Bruns heads the Center for Maritime Strategy & Security (CMSS) at the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel. His work focuses on naval strategy and the German and U.S. navies. Together with Sarandis Papadopoulos, he has recently published Conceptualizing Maritime & Naval Strategy. Festschrift for Captain Peter M. Swartz, United States Navy, retired (Nomos, 2020). He is the 2021-2022 Fulbright McCain Fellow at the US Naval Academy.

Endnotes

¹ Robert Schneller, “Anchor of Resolve. A History of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/Fifth Fleet”, Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C. 2007; Edward Marolda, “Ready Seapower. A History of the U.S. Seventh Fleet”, Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C. 2012. 

² See Ryan French & Peter Dombrowski, “Exercise BALTOPS: Reassurance and Deterrence in a Contested Littoral”, in Beatrice Heuser, Tormod Heier and Guillaume Lasconjarias (eds.), Military Exercises: Political Messaging and Strategic Impact. NATO Defence College: Rome 2018, pp.187-212. 

³ See Jeremy Stöhs, The Decline of European Naval Forces. Challenges to Sea Power in an Age of Fiscal Austerity and Political Uncertainty. USNI Press: Annapolis 2018. 

⁴ See Sebastian Bruns & Sarah Kirchberger, “The PLA Navy in the Baltic Sea. A View from Kiel”, Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC), 16 August 2017. 

Featured Image: Ships assigned to Combined Task Force One Five Zero (CTF-150) assemble in a formation for a photo exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Bart Bauer.)