Building brigades: Canada, NATO allies struggle to shore up Baltic defences against Russian threat
CBC
The idea looks good on paper.
But converting NATO's so-called "tripwire" forces in the three Baltic countries to fully topped-up fighting brigades — the kind that could withstand a Russian invasion — is proving to be a challenge for the lead nations involved: Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.
At the last NATO summit in Madrid, leaders of the western military alliance ordered the conversion of battle groups in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to full combat brigades with anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 troops each, depending on the availability of equipment.
Getting there is proving to be a struggle, according to two recent reports — one from the U.K. House of Commons, the other from a Warsaw-based international affairs think-tank.
Since that June NATO summit, journalists have been asking Canadian politicians and military officials when the Canadian-led brigade in Latvia will be created and what it will look like. Their responses have been vague.
In a recent interview with CBC News, Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre wouldn't be pinned down to a precise timeline but said "the first exercise we're looking at is in 2024 … at the brigade level."
Which means that completing the expansion to brigade level could take Canada two years from start to finish.
And it seems Canada isn't the only country struggling with the creation of combat brigades — despite the demands of Baltic leaders and the political urgency western politicians have attached to the project.
A research briefing for the British House of Commons noted that the U.K., which leads the NATO mission in Estonia, has two battle groups assigned to the country — one under the alliance flag, the other deployed bilaterally by former prime minister Boris Johnson in the immediate aftermath of Russia's full invasion of Ukraine.
"However, in October the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced that the additional battlegroup will not be replaced in 2023," said the research paper, dated Nov. 21, 2022.
"The U.K. will continue to lead the NATO battlegroup. Instead of the additional battlegroup, the U.K. will hold at high readiness the 'balance of a Brigade' in the U.K., available to deploy if needed."
The U.K. also promised to "surge" forces throughout the year to conduct exercises, enhance its headquarters and provide support to the Estonian armed forces.
The problem — according to the Centre for Eastern Studies, a Warsaw-based analytics organization — is that the U.K., like Canada, doesn't have enough troops to deploy without resorting to drastic measures like mobilization.
"At present — and for the foreseeable future — the British Army is unable to maintain a continuous rotational presence of an entire armoured brigade outside the U.K. without announcing mobilization," says a Centre for Eastern Studies report entitled Expectations vs. Reality: NATO Brigades in the Baltic States.
