The U.S. Army and its NATO allies are embarking on the execution of a new “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” plan that aims to enhance ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance, the U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander said Wednesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.
As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination, according to Gen. Christopher Donahue.
Regional plans have been coming together for some time, but the Army, along with NATO, is first focusing on the Baltic states “to try to get to how do you actually make it so that industry and the nations know exactly what the requirements are — ultimately that is now known as the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” Donahue said.
“We know what we have to develop and the use case that we’re using is you have to [deter] from the ground,” he said. “The land domain is not becoming less important, it’s becoming more important. You can now take down [anti-access, aerial-denial] A2AD bubbles from the ground. You can now take over sea from the ground. All of those things we are watching happen in Ukraine.”
For example, Donahue noted, Kaliningrad, Russia, is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.”