{"id":35023,"date":"2016-06-09T03:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T07:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35023"},"modified":"2016-06-08T09:33:01","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T13:33:01","slug":"natos-peacetime-border-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/06\/09\/natos-peacetime-border-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO’s peacetime border problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Foreign Affairs<\/em>, Elisabeth Braw<\/a> discusses a problem NATO faces every time there’s a need to move troops across national borders within the alliance:<\/p>\n

\u201cNATO\u2019s member states are willing to defend one another, and they have the troops and the equipment to do so. But quickly getting those troops and equipment to their destination is a different matter altogether. In some new NATO member states, bridges and railroads are simply not suitable for large troop movements. But one thing frustrates commanders even more: the arduous process of getting permission to move troops across borders.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was probably na\u00efve,\u201d admits Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. \u201cI assumed that because these were NATO and EU countries we\u2019d just be able to move troops. But ministries of defense are not responsible for borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s the complication. Moving troops across Europe requires permission at each border. \u201cDuring the Cold War, we had pretty good plans to rapidly move across borders, but until [the 2014 NATO summit in] Wales we didn\u2019t have similar plans for new NATO member states,\u201d says a NATO official knowledgeable with the issue. \u201cRight after Crimea we sent out a questionnaire about [border regulations] to each member states, and the results were pretty scary. Some countries needed to recall parliament in order to let NATO units cross their borders. And one country said, \u2018we can only have 1,600 soldiers on our soil.\u2019\u201d In reality, that meant that NATO would be unable to use that member state, which the NATO official declined to identify, for passage.<\/p>\n

Since then, NATO has made impressive progress. It has tripled the size of its 13-year-old NATO Response Force (NRF), which can muster up to 40,000 troops and is, at least in theory, able to deploy quickly to new NATO member states as well as old ones. And all of its member states have agreed to pre-clearance\u2014the military version of a green card for troops and equipment\u2014although it is not clear how the system will work in practice. As the NATO official reports, \u201csome countries say \u2018we don\u2019t need any advance notice for pre-clearance,\u2019 while others say they need four to five days\u2019 notice.\u201d According to the official, in most of NATO\u2019s eastern-facing countries, getting the clearance would be a matter of five days or fewer, although one country\u2014he declined to specify which one\u2014still requires more time.<\/p>\n

And so, although Hodges and his fellow commanders know how fast their troops can physically move, they have little idea whether crossing borders will take five days, two days, or perhaps just hours. \u201cAn official [in an eastern European NATO member state] told me, \u2018I hope we can get this [clearance] done quickly,\u2019\u201d Hodges reports. \u201cBut you can\u2019t plan based on hopes and wishes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Colonel Ted Campbell<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Foreign Affairs, Elisabeth Braw discusses a problem NATO faces every time there’s a need to move troops across national borders within the alliance: \u201cNATO\u2019s member states are willing to defend one another, and they have the troops and the equipment to do so. But quickly getting those troops and equipment to their destination is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62,5],"tags":[31,316,432,220],"class_list":["post-35023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-military","tag-army","tag-borders","tag-diplomacy","tag-nato"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-96T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35024,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35023\/revisions\/35024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}