According to WSJ, Grynkewich described measures designed to stop the initial attack and, if the aggression continues, deprive the enemy of the ability to command troops and supply them with everything they need. The plan’s goal is to stop the invasion at an early stage, minimize the risk of escalation into a conventional or nuclear war, and avoid resorting to the complete destruction of the enemy.
The plan calls for the creation of a vast “autonomous zone” where drones and ground robots will contain the Russian advance without the risk of significant losses for allied forces. At the same time, long-range missiles are to strike Russian command posts and air defense systems in the Kaliningrad region, near St. Petersburg, and in Belarus.
Such a strike, according to WSJ, is intended to undermine Russia’s ability to control airspace and allow the U.S. Army’s V Corps and other NATO ground forces to go on the counteroffensive. NATO aviation, as follows from the plan, will promptly attack Russian reinforcements as they move toward the battlefield and other targets in the rear.
The strikes are to be coordinated through a “digital framework” — a system for the instant exchange of classified target data via cloud infrastructure. According to U.S. military officials cited by WSJ, individual elements of this network have already been tested in the Middle East during the U.S. military campaign against Iran.
This approach was named the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative”. Its main goal, as WSJ writes, is to make Putin, when assessing NATO’s defense, come to the conclusion “not today”; to this end, allies constantly hold exercises, testing and demonstrating readiness.
While Grynkewich was speaking in Warsaw, more than 20,000 service members from across NATO were taking part in the ten-day exercise “Steadfast Duel”. They simulated a scenario in which about one million service members from allied countries must repel an invasion from the east by forces of comparable size, and German General Thomas Lowin called these maneuvers “100 percent” consistent with Grynkewich’s “theory of victory”. Another participant in the exercise told WSJ that other maneuvers also practiced precision strikes with ground-based “surface-to-surface” missiles.
In August, Bild wrote that NATO already had a concept for responding to a Russian attack on the Baltic states, including strikes on targets in the Russian rear, including the Kaliningrad region.
