The Atlantic alliance wants a new role after Afghanistan. For the time being, it is looking to an old one

ACROSS a rolling, misty plain in northern Poland, counter-attacking Leopard II tanks and armoured vehicles move out from their defensive positions. All around are blasts from heavy ordnance and the chatter of machine-guns. Air-defence missiles shriek across the leaden sky. Teams of French chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear clean-up specialists race in behind the forward echelons. Soon news comes that the invading “Bothnian” forces are in retreat.

This is the final stage of Steadfast Jazz 2013, NATO’s biggest live-fire exercise since 2006. The manoeuvres in Poland and the Baltic states, which ended on November 8th, involved about 6,000 personnel from NATO countries as well as from Sweden, Finland and Ukraine. About half of them engaged in simulated combat; the rest were part of a command-and-control exercise integrating land, air, maritime and special forces. Latvia was home to the command headquarters; Estonia was victim of an attack by the fictitious Bothnia.

Despite the tactful insistence that the exercise was not planned with any real aggressor in mind (the notional Bothnia was near Finland), the identity of the “victims” was no coincidence. Planning for Steadfast Jazz began soon after large Russian exercises four years ago which rehearsed an invasion of the Baltic states and included a simulated nuclear attack on Poland. In September Russian and Belarusian forces conducted another big exercise involving, according to some unofficial estimates, up to 70,000 men (but, as far as observers could tell, no nukes).

NATO defence spending is falling fast, but Russia’s military budget rose by 26% this year. Nervous border countries also point to the belligerent tone of Kremlin pronouncements, including the threat of preventive attacks on parts of the European missile-defence system that America is deploying. On Good Friday this year Russian warplanes staged a dummy attack on Sweden. Two weeks ago they carried out another one, with Poland and Lithuania targeted too.

Such worries are still, formally, in the background. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general, said Steadfast Jazz was a “a signal to anyone who might have an intention to attack a NATO ally, but I don’t expect Russia to have any intention to attack NATO allies…so you might say it is a signal ‘to whom it may concern’.”

Spit and polish

But it also bears on the big open question at NATO: what happens after combat operations in Afghanistan cease at the end of next year. That 12-year mission—by far the biggest in NATO’s 64-year history—has been bloody, frustrating and sometimes divisive. But it has greatly boosted allied forces’ ability to work and fight together. Philip Breedlove, an American air-force general and the new SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander for Europe) says the alliance is “at the pinnacle of our interconnectedness”. Between 2007 and 2011, he notes, America’s European command, EUCOM, trained 42,000 NATO and partnercountry troops for Afghan deployments.

From next year, that glue will start to unstick. The alliance’s remaining forces in Afghanistan (down from 100,000 now to probably around 12,000, assuming a deal on the legal status of foreign troops is reached with the authorities in Kabul) will merely train, advise and assist Afghan forces, though America will retain some counter-terrorism capability.

This month’s exercise and the much larger ones now planned—Trident Juncture in southern Europe in 2015 will be six or seven times bigger—aim to try to preserve Afghan-era co-operation through something called the “connected forces initiative”. Above all, it means that forces from all members (and some partners) have the doctrine and technology to combine on the “networked battlefield”—especially with the Americans, who set many of NATO’s standards.

The beneficiary of all this is the new NATO Response Force (NRF). With a joint headquarters and 13,000 “highly ready and technologically advanced” troops provided on a rotating basis by members, it is seen as the “tip of the spear” for the alliance’s future deployments. This includes everything from acting as the first line of territorial defence to providing disaster relief. The NRF aims to operate either on its own or as a force that buys time before reinforcements arrive.

The NRF’s big live-fire exercises will also, General Breedlove notes, help sharpen techniques for high-intensity “kinetic” warfare against a more conventional but also more capable enemy. That is a priority, because the alliance has focused so much on counter-insurgency in recent years.

Furthermore, annual exercises should keep American troops coming to Europe, at a time when the “pivot” to Asia and Pentagon budget cuts mean that their permanent presence on the continent is shrinking. Barely 30,000 American forces are based in Europe today, compared with 213,000 in 1989. Worryingly, America only sent about 300 personnel to Steadfast Jazz (France sent 1,000). When Afghanistan is over, it may show more willing.

Trying to keep NATO cohesive and adaptable is laudable, but will it work? To get some poorly equipped European forces up to the level needed to work with the Americans in Afghanistan was a struggle, but lives depended on it. Exercises cannot provide the same urgency. And although Russia tries to look menacing, in reality neither its apparent intentions nor its military capabilities (nuclear forces aside) are yet a galvanising threat. Terrorism and cyber-attacks, two of the dangers identified by NATO’s post-Afghanistan “strategic concept” agreed on at its 2010 Lisbon summit, demand a different response.

To stay relevant, NATO must provide security beyond just Europe. General Breedlove notes the value of bases there, which allow America to “project force” in volatile regions in Africa and the Middle East. These “long-standing trust relationships…are absolutely key to the future.”

Such missions are unlikely to invoke Article 5, the alliance’s collective-defence clause and the record on such action is patchy. America “led from behind” on Libya; Germany stayed away. Mr Rasmussen insists that NATO must be able to meet any eventuality. But without a clearer sense of what those eventualities may be it will struggle to do so, despite good intentions—and big exercises with funny names.