Before it disappears into the memory hole I wanted to take note of WSJ London editor Jillian Kay Melchior’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. A NATO wargame in Estonia has revealed some serious deficiencies not just in NATO’s combined defense capabilities but in its institutional capacity to learn and adapt:
Russia and Ukraine have shown the world the future of warfare—and America and its allies aren’t ready for it. That’s the lesson of a major exercise that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members conducted in Estonia last May. What transpired during the exercise, with the details reported here for the first time, exposed serious tactical shortcomings and vulnerabilities in high-intensity drone combat.
The exercise, known as Hedgehog 2025, involved more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries who drilled alongside Ukrainian drone experts, including soldiers borrowed from the front line. It simulated a “contested and congested” battlefield with various kinds of drones, says Lt. Col. Arbo Probal, head of the unmanned systems program for the Estonian Defence Forces. “The aim was really to create friction, the stress for units, and the cognitive overload as soon as possible,” he says. That tests the soldiers’ ability to adapt under fire.
What the wargame reveals more than any single tactical failure is the widening gap between institutions that are operating under real evolutionary pressure and those that are not. Ukraine is learning under fire. Its feedback loop is measured in hours and days. Russia, whatever its other deficiencies, is subjected to the same brutal discipline. NATO, by contrast, is largely learning in simulations and conferences. Exercises are useful but they are not selection events. War is. Institutions that survive it adapt—or they disappear. We should assume that both Ukraine and Russia are adapting. The question is whether NATO’s collective defense structure can adapt at anything like the same speed without the benefit or the horror of actual battlefield experience.
Here’s the kernel of the piece:
A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets.
and
Overall, the results were “horrible” for NATO forces, says Mr. Hanniotti, who now works in the private sector as an unmanned systems expert. The adversary forces were “able to eliminate two battalions in a day,” so that “in an exercise sense, basically, they were not able to fight anymore after that.” The NATO side “didn’t even get our drone teams.”
We have very little experience operating in a drone-saturated battlespace against a near-peer adversary. Whether we are prepared is not something open sources can answer. A word to the wise is sufficient.
I hope our European allies were paying close attention. I may be wrong but the evidence suggests that they aren’t. I have identified articles in Slovakian and Romanian on the exercises but not in German or French. It is telling that coverage appears in countries that sit closer to Russia’s shadow while comparable discussion in German or French media is harder to find. There’s nothing like an imminent sentence of death to clarify the mind.
