NATO Public Forum: The Military Scene-Setter with SACEUR Christopher G. Cavoli
By Peter Rough, Fletcher alumnus and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute
As Russia’s military strength threatens to overrun Ukraine and strike North Atlantic Treaty Organization territory, Supreme Allied Commander Europe Christopher G. Cavoli is tasked with bolstering European nations’ defense capabilities.
Hudson Senior Fellow Peter Rough joined General Cavoli to discuss the future of defense in Europe at the 2024 NATO Public Forum.
Event Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Peter Rough:
Well, good morning. As mentioned, I’m Peter Rough, senior fellow and director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at Hudson Institute, and it is my high honor to be joined today by United States Army General Chris Cavoli. General Cavoli was commissioned into the infantry in 1987. He’s had a long and distinguished career culminating in his appointment to EUCOM, a position he took up on July 1st, 2022. And three days later on our nation’s birthday, July 4th, he became Supreme Allied Commander Europe. General Cavoli, welcome to the Public Forum.
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Thank you, Peter.
Peter Rough:
At public conferences like these that focus on European security, we tend to talk a lot about deterrence, how to preserve the peace that the alliance has forged for us over the decades, but there tends to be less focus on war fighting capability, the ability to actually win a war should deterrence fail. So to rectify that imbalance a little bit, let me ask you, how confident are you that the alliance could be able to conduct high intensity combat 10, 20, 30 days into a war with Russia should deterrence fail?
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Oh, I’m quite confident. So we have over the last couple of years, based on the work of my predecessors, one of whom is sitting right over there, hi Scap, how are you sir? We have been building out a strategic concept and then the enablement of that strategic concept for the deterrence and defense of the Euro Atlantic area. So it started with the strategic approach and then it’s come down through a couple of major documents.
In the last couple of years, what we’ve done is turn those into concrete plans, traditional classical operational plans that describe how we’re going to defend specific areas of the alliance and what we’re going to use to do it and what the sequence of events is. This is a big, big shift. The alliance had gone for many years without plans, since the end of the Cold War, real significant plans to defend the territory of the alliance.
That has produced a whole range of changes for us. As you know, after the end of the Cold War, the alliance refocused on out of area operations and crisis management. These tended to be smaller scale operations done on a predictable basis, so it allowed for a cyclical force generation model. All of this gave us the opportunity to economize, especially in terms of higher headquarters, and enabling organizations such as logistics brigades and long range fires and things like that. All that’s coming back now as a result of the plans.
The plans have given us a four structure requirement that’s guiding the way we resource the plans and the way NATO’s militaries, the national militaries, compose themselves, what sort of forces they built for us. It is produced in a very short amount of time. Instead of a cyclically available brigade or two, we suddenly now have 300 forces at the higher 2 levels of readiness against the plans, 300,000, even more depending on how you count. That’s because we’ve been able to amalgamate and incorporate national defense plans into the NATO defense plan, so they compliment each other. And it’s produced an ability to be forward postured. As you know, we’ve got eight battle groups on the ground forward posture that blend with national host Nation forces in their Article 3 responsibilities.
So it’s a very effective method. We have the right number of troops forward right now. We’ve been practicing at large scale our ability to reinforce. As you know, those battle groups need to be reinforced when the time is needed up to the brigade level. We’ve been rehearsing that. We’ve done extensive readiness checks to make sure they have the right amount of ammunition and so forth. And as we go forward, we’ve continued to do these large scale exercises where we practice the subsequent reinforcement of specific areas. Steadfast Defender this year, over 90,000 soldiers.
So I’m very confident in our ability to do that. We have some weaknesses that we have to work on and we will.
Peter Rough:
Those DDA family of plans were of course ratified at the last NATO summit in Vilnius. How far along are the allies in resourcing those plans?
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Quite far along. So all of this reorientation from out of area operations onto large scale collective defense of the territory of the alliance is a profound shift, right? It’s a very, very big shift. National militaries have to go through that shift on their own. The U.S. military has been undergoing it for several years now. And for the alliance, it’s a big shift. It’s challenged a lot of the ways we did business during the last 35 years.
One of those is the way we generate force and the way we source our operational plans. The way we did it was frankly designed to put together very small organizations on a very predictable basis. Now, we’ve had to turn the system around. Instead of what will you make available, the question is, if we got into a large scale fight, what would you not make available? We assume you’ll make most of your military available.
My Deputy Admiral Keith Blount is the one who came up with this reformulation of the question, and it immediately refocused our allies in the way they contribute. So several allies have contributed their entire military force structure, save just a tiniest amount, to NATO’s plans. As a result of this, for the most part, in capital platforms, in large ground units, we’re pretty much where we need to be. We have some gaps in specific places, especially at enablement and logistics, that sort of thing. And those we’re working on through the NATO defense planning process right now.
Peter Rough:
My colleagues at Hudson Institute who track the war most closely have suggested that Russia has shown some adaptability on the battlefield and have learned some lessons along the way. Is NATO learning lessons from the war in Ukraine and are you confident that our learning curve is ahead of the Russians?
Christopher G. Cavoli:
So I think the first thing to remember is that NATO consists of nations’ militaries, right? So those nations are studying very intensely the war in Ukraine, and each of the nations is, our member nations, are developing and evolving new techniques and working on new technologies. But we as an alliance, also study it very closely. We have a couple of different organizations that study the war in Ukraine, and we’re about to set one up with our Ukrainian colleagues in Poland, the JTEC is going to come together, and that will really be an information exchange center for lessons learned.
Then we incorporate those into our future doctrine. My friend Philippe Lavigne, who I hope is here someplace, the Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation, writes future concepts that are largely informed by what we’re seeing in Ukraine. And then of course inside the alliance, we use our exercise program to test new techniques and new technologies, that for the most part nations bring forward into the exercise.
But it is quickly evolving. Your colleagues at Hudson are right, the Russians are very cleverly adapting, technologically and procedurally, to many of the challenges that they run into in Ukraine.
Peter Rough:
One thing that’s less discussed are SACEUR’s peace time authorities, but that has evolved somewhat since the onset of full scale hostilities in Ukraine. Are your authorities commensurate and sufficient to prepare the alliance in a period of high tension prior to full onset of hostilities? And perhaps for the audience you could just lay out what those authorities are.
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Yeah. So SACEUR’s authorities were pretty circumscribed during long periods of peace, which is fairly appropriate. At the beginning of this conflict, my predecessor Tod Wolters, petition the NAC to activate the five graduated response plans, which is a form of planning process that we had. When those were activated, general Wolters suddenly got significant authorities to move folks around. For example, he got the authority to deploy parts or all of the very high readiness joint task force on his plan. He got the authority to perform specified enhanced vigilance activities throughout the AOR, so he could name an operation and then conduct it, defensive operations.
As we came through the new family of plans, one part of the remodernization of NATO’s collective defense has been to change the way we grant authorities to SACEUR. And instead of going one by one through an incredibly arcane manual, like this thick, that gives one authority at a time, what we’ve done is we’ve bundled authorities together and we’ve attached those to certain alert states. And some amount of the alert state, I’m allowed to declare, like up to alert state yellow, and just inform the NAC, and that gives me certain authorities. And then for a higher levels of alert, the NAC has to grant that in a deliberate political move.
So I have the authority to do everything I need to do right now I believe in the run up to a period of conflict, to include deploying forces to deter the conflict, and then to be in position and be ready if the alliance should invoke Article 5. Yeah, I do think we’ve made a huge amount of progress in the past couple of years on that.
Peter Rough:
Because it’s so rare to have the opportunity to interview SACEUR, I asked a few of my colleagues for a question, so I’ve gotten one from them.
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Can’t they just raise their hands?
Peter Rough:
They dare not show up given the question. I’m just kidding.
The NATO force model is replacing the NATO response force, and at Tier 3, the new force structure is expected to field 500,000 troops in 30 to 100 days. Such a large scale deployment, that high readiness will require a thorough inspection mechanism. Do you have any such measures in mind like snap exercises?
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Yeah, we sure do. We’ve already got a readiness program inside the alliance. The question is how vigorously is it exercised and is there any compliance mechanism inside it? Compliance in the alliance is always up to nations, it’s a political act how high a level of readiness they want to maintain. But I do have the authority and the systems necessary to go inspect readiness.
We’re changing some of the things we look at. So as we look in Ukraine, we’ve put in an increased emphasis on stockpiles and munitions and supplies on hand and readily available. We’ve extended some of the things we look at to the logistical systems necessary to deploy and to resupply to our troops. Instead of just looking at the sharp side of the sword, we’re looking at the whole sword now.
And we’ve developed teams that will become active very soon that will go out and check readiness based on my authorities to inspect the readiness of the forces under my command, or that are to be under my command in a time of crisis.
Peter Rough:
We have a minute and a half left, so I’ll ask you one final question. You mentioned the battle groups earlier, the President last night at the Mellon Auditorium discussed the four that were in existence prior to the full scale invasion, the four new ones that have been put in place in the southern eastern flank of the alliance. We’ve seen what can happen under even short-term occupation by Russian forces in places like Bucha and Irpin. How confident are you that the forward land forces concept can guard against such a contingency in say, the Baltic states?
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Well, the forward land forces concept is not the totality of our plans to defend, right? It’s the beginning of it, it’s the stuff that’s in place. And it’s only one domain, those are just land forces. We have air forces, we have other forces. It’s just the beginning. All of that gets reinforced at time of crisis and in the case of a conflict, all of that would become reinforced. I’m very confident that it can defend forward.
The plans are specifically designed and the timetables are specifically designed to defend every inch of the alliance’s territory, and I think when we look at what happened in Ukraine, in places like Bucha and Irpin, in places like that, Izyum, I have a moral responsibility to defend every inch of our territory and all the citizens on it.
Peter Rough:
General Cavoli, thank you for being here.
Christopher G. Cavoli:
Thanks, Peter. It’s great.
Peter Rough:
Thank you, sir.
(This post is republished from the Hudson Institute.)