The following conversation has been edited for clarity. The views expressed in this episode are the guest’s own.
Rick Landgraf: Joining me today are two scholars who have been studying European allied military support to Ukraine. The first is John Deni. John is a research professor of security studies at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a nonresident associate fellow at the NATO Defense College. John, welcome to the show.
John Deni: Thanks Rick.
RL: Also with us today is Lisa Aronsson. She is a research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University, and a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Lisa, welcome.
Lisa Aronsson: Thanks.
RL: The views expressed by these authors are their own and do not reflect those of the US Army, the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government. John, let's dive right into this research project that you've been conducting with Lisa over the recent past year. Can you please discuss the project's goals and the background of this project, how it came to be?
JD: Sure, Rick. That's a great way to get us kicked off here. This study began as an effort initially just by the US Army War College, but then in collaboration with both Columbia University and National Defense University to examine the many lessons that could be learned from the war in Ukraine. There are a lot of government entities, a lot of think tank entities, even academia that are looking at this as well. We were trying to take more of a strategic look to examine what are the strategic implications across a variety of domains and issue areas that the US military can draw. These three entities I mentioned, the Army War College, Columbia University, and NDU, are looking at a variety of issues regarding the war, including integrated deterrence, leadership in the war, ethical and legal norms, protracted conflict, strategy and planning behind the war. The small part of it that Lisa and I are looking at is the role of European allies and partners in the war.
And we are specifically examining the role that our European allies played in providing military assistance. Those allies, individually and collectively, have played a major role in humanitarian assistance and in fiscal or budgetary support to Ukraine, but we are looking at just the military support that they've offered. We're looking at that in the time period from the war’s outbreak, February 22, through really the end of or late 2023. We've been engaged in this study now for a little over a year, and we're looking forward to its public launch here in about a month at about the time of the NATO summit.
RL: Lisa, turning to you now, can you talk a little bit about the methodology of the research, who you talked to, what you studied, and some of the findings of this project?
LA: Sure, thanks. Just building on what John said, our starting point for a deeper dive on the role of allies and partners, we started by looking at the US National Defense Strategy of 2022, which we found places a much more significant emphasis on engaging with allies and partners. It calls them a center of gravity. So we thought we'd organize our research to provide some analysis for our government stakeholders that really looked at that topic. So we have kind of a two-part research question.
The question that we sought to answer is can the United States rely on its European allies and partners to sustain or even increase their military support to Ukraine in the near term. That's the question we sought to answer with this research. Then we're hopeful that our findings will be able to shed some light on what we might be able to expect from our European allies and partners in a longer-term conflict, confrontation with Russia, or in future iterations of strategic competition with Russia and perhaps with China as well. So to answer that first question, what can we expect from European allies and partners?
We have a sort of four-part method. First, we did a sort of literature review looking at the burden-sharing literature within the Alliance, which dates back to the 1950s and 60s. We looked at the dynamics of coalition warfare, a body of literature and strategic studies that looks at what circ under what circumstances do partners, big or small, add value to a particular operation or mission. Then we took a deep dive, we took a close look at how events unfolded over time and in detail from 2022 through the end of 2023: How did these structures for supporting Ukraine get stood up? Why weren't the existing structures within NATO, for instance, used to coordinate and deliver this? So we looked closely at that process of how this all unfolded.
Then we chose eight country case studies: Finland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and the UK. We interviewed more than fifty or so officials in all of these capitals and at their embassies in Washington to have a closer look at: Were they surprised by this full scale invasion? How did they react? What's the strategic rationale for their delivery of support, military support to Ukraine? What kind of publicly announced assistance had they given during the first two years of this war? What kinds of lessons learned have they taken? What kinds of efforts have they made to figure out what assistance has worked and what might have been counterproductive? What are the prospects for them to do more? We also did a quantitative analysis where we looked at a correlation analysis between meetings of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which meets monthly, and we examined whether those meetings actually resulted in an increase in publicly announced military assistance as compared with other meetings, such as NATO Ministerials, European Union meetings, or Chiefs of Defense meetings. So that was the method. In the study, we look at the findings across the eight country case studies and we draw out some implications for US National Defense Strategy and some more practical recommendations for policymakers.
RL: John zooming out here a bit, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, can you explain exactly what that is, what the purpose is, and how that came to be?
JD: The UDCG or Ukraine Defense Contract Group was really an ad hoc grouping forum created by the US in the immediate wake of Russia's second invasion in February of 2022. It's been meeting almost on a monthly basis in person nearly all the time, sometimes virtually, but typically in person at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. It's convened by the Secretary of Defense for himself and for his counterparts across not only NATO, but beyond NATO. There are over fifty countries that are members of the UDCG. They meet to coordinate their assistance, to learn the latest in terms of operations and what's unfolding on the ground in Ukraine. Ukrainian military staff, or general staff, typically attends these meetings. There's an effort on the part of the United States and leading allies of this ad hoc coalition to try to use those meetings as almost forcing functions to try to convince allies and partners to bring more to the table each month to assist Ukraine in military terms, but also in a variety of other areas. Now, these meetings, they're political level meetings, right? I mentioned the SECDEF, the American SECDEF leads for the United States and its counterparts there from across Europe and elsewhere and often these meetings have kind of almost a pro forma scripted kind of in the way they unfold, right? The characteristics of them and the nature of them is almost kind of scripted in a way, but they still form a really important function in terms of bringing all the players, the key donors, around the table at the same time with Ukrainians to understand what's really needed on the ground. Our quantitative analysis found that they do indeed make a small difference. It's not huge, but we found a limited but positive correlation between those meetings and the public pronouncements on donations of military assistance relative to other meetings and forums, such as defense ministerials held by NATO or EU meetings, that sort of thing. So they do matter. Now, whether they make a massive increase in the amount of aid that flows into Ukraine, I think that's open to debate. I don't think we found evidence of that, but they've nonetheless provided a pretty important forum for the United States and key allies to gather around the table and learn what's needed and try to generate a response to that need.
RL: Lee, so turning him back to you, what are the different types of military support that the European allies have provided to Ukraine so far in the war?
LA: Building on what John said about the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, this is all at the sort of political level but then transitioning to the operational level, we might also just start out with the fact that this has been the operational support. The allies and partners have given materiel, equipment, ammunition, training support, logistics, some operational support that has been more on the classified side—so in this study we've we've stayed away from there—and also they've made efforts to try to draw some lessons in terms of what's worked, what hasn't worked, and then adjust their support from there.
Initially, the coordination and the transfer of this support started out a little bit disjointed. The US 18th Airborne Corps played a key role at the beginning. It was deployed to Poland as part of a troop buildup that was initially intended to reassure allies and deter Russia, and then possibly even to manage refugee flows coming out of Ukraine through Poland, but it ended up playing, quite unexpectedly, an important role helping transfer this material into Ukraine and military assistance into Ukraine. From there, Poland has become one of the most important primary routes through which 80 percent of international military assistance is delivered through Poland, including the airport in Rzeszów, but also through its railways.
Other allies have provided really important logistics roles as well and redundancy, especially Romania. That was when we got into the details of the case studies. Romania and others have chosen to deliver their support in a much more quiet way for reasons that have to do with their own national security, threat perceptions, and their strategic cultures. But the allies have delivered a huge range of military support from equipment to logistics, operational, training, intelligence, just about across the board, aside from boots on the ground,
RL: John, I'll come back to you. So what has worked in terms of allied support and what can be done better, both allies, individual allies, and as a whole in supporting Ukraine?
JD: Rick, that's a good question. We didn't dive into the details of the efficacy of the assistance effort. That was a question we actually asked in our semi-structured interviews for each of the case studies. What are the allies doing to measure their effectiveness? How do they know what they're doing is effective or not, where they need to do more, where they need to maybe to do less? Frankly, few of the allies have any kind of robust measures of effectiveness, not even the US. Now, there are lots of lessons learned or maybe I should say lessons identified, processes, some of which have unfolded since the very earliest days of the war. But in terms of measures of effectiveness, the tools that allies are using to determine what's working, what's not, in terms of material or the kinds of training we're offering, they're pretty blunt. According to some that we spoke with, it's as simple as meters or kilometers gained on the battlefield. But that's not really a good indication that gives the allies a sense of where refinements need to occur. Now, there are a variety—aside from the very obvious, how far is Ukraine advancing in the battlefield—of informal feedback loops that are occurring though. For example, most of the allies and partners that are donating to Ukraine have got embassy staff in Kiev. They get some feedback there in capital from political officials of the Ukrainian government but also from their contacts on the general staff.
In some cases, some of the allied officers that are working to provide assistance, they've got friends in Ukraine among Ukrainian military officers and staff. They're able to get feedback informally in that way. We also have seen evidence of some of the private contractors that are on the ground in Ukraine providing maintenance support, that sort of a thing. I'm thinking specifically of Rheinmetall, a German manufacturer. They've got a presence in Ukraine. Now, they're not on the front line, right? They're not seeing what's happening in terms of the tactics and techniques and procedures used by Ukrainians, but they are receiving damaged Ukrainian equipment.
And so they can infer from that the kinds of of success, the degree of success, that Russians are having in thwarting the use of Western military equipment. So that provides an indirect feedback loop into the West so we can better refine the kinds of equipment that we're providing to the Ukrainians. I think this is one of the challenges that we deal with across the security cooperation realm, if you will, not merely with regard to what we're doing in Ukraine, but certainly what we've seen in the last couple of decades in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our inability to really have robust measures of effectiveness for our security cooperation has in many ways limited the efficacy of that cooperation, those efforts to provide equipment and training. So we can't claim to have this right in the US and certainly the evidence that Lisa and I uncovered in our study through our interviews especially indicates our allies haven't figured this out either.
RL: The Ukraine Defense Contact Group has been a US-led effort, but with the participation of fifty countries, as you have said: NATO members, but beyond NATO members as well. The NATO Secretary General has recently talked about an effort to bring the coordination of Allied military support and tuck that under a NATO umbrella. Along with that, making arguments for increased pledges to Ukrainian assistance, whether it's military support or economic support otherwise. Why, and in your view, John, is this happening now? Where does this effort stand?
JD: Well, I think there's no avoiding the obvious that to some degree the allies are concerned about. One of our leading presidential candidates in this country has expressed what we might describe as a complex relationship with the NATO Alliance and made some comments in the past few months that for some Europeans have appeared to undermine deterrence. When I engage with European counterparts across the continent, they express great concern about that. I think there's an effort to make the UDCG less reliant on the personal engagement and efforts of the American Secretary of Defense. One of the things we heard over and over in our interviews was the degree to which Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been personally invested in this. From our perspective that's to his great credit, but I think there's another way to look at this: If he's not there will the UDCG in some way become diminished? Will the energy that goes into organizing it every month and into controlling the allies to bring something to the table, will that diminish in some way? So I think moving this into a NATO-led forum, or putting it more under NATO's umbrella, would be a step toward depersonalizing it and enabling it to have some institutional longevity beyond the very ad hoc nature that characterizes it at this point.
RL: Lisa, back to you. I wanted to ask about this effort about perhaps bringing the Defense Contact Group under NATO, but also in your conversations with allied officials. In my conversations that I've had with folks is the issue of consensus within NATO and how NATO major decisions require allied consensus. In your discussions and interviews with officials, has that come up as a major obstacle or a challenge, this idea of political cohesion and maintaining consensus within the Alliance?
LA: Absolutely. That's a challenge that the Alliance has faced ever since its founding. It's a consensus-based organization. The US and other European allies were actually relieved in a sense. We heard from this and in our interviews that the Alliance wasn't initially used in February of 2022 as a convening forum for the assistance because the most important thing was delivering that assistance effectively and efficiently and as quickly as possible. I think that's part of the reason why the US decided not to use this institution at the beginning, but to set up an ad hoc structure. The Brits also showed leadership in this area in order to help pivot quickly to supporting Ukraine.
That was also a decision taken not to feed into Putin's narrative that NATO is party to this war or that NATO is involved directly in this war because of course this is a war that Russia has unleashed on Ukraine. So there was a deliberate effort to sidestep it at the beginning, and the need for effectiveness and efficiency and speed is still there. I think as John said, the proposal to shift the coordination role to NATO is an important one because now we know that this is likely to be a longer-term conflict that requires this kind of institutional long-term commitment, not just from NATO delivering the coordination, but allies need to be delivering multi-year commitments. This we're seeing from a number of allies. The proposal actually from the Secretary General had three parts. First was that NATO would take over the coordination role of the UDCG, but of course it will still rely on US enablers, the US presence, the US bandwidth. We're effectively the only ally that can deliver this coordination role and the enablers at the scale that's required.
But the Secretary General also proposed a big multi-year financial pledge of military aid at about 40 billion euros annually. There are some details over how that will be funded, which allies will contribute what. Here again, the consensus issue will come up. The other part of the proposal is around Ukraine's future membership in the alliance. Unfortunately, at the Vilnius summit last year, this issue came up with Zelensky's anger in learning that Ukraine wouldn't be receiving an invitation to membership at that time.
It looks like the Washington summit won't be a membership summit either. The terms I've heard are “Let's offer Ukraine a quote unquote bridge to membership that involves both practical and political commitments, and identifying and presenting a clear path for Ukraine's future within NATO.” It remains to be seen what specifically will be included in that quote unquote bridge to membership and whether it will deliver the, as John said, institutional longevity of and sort of the commitments that Ukraine needs.
RL: I want to turn the page here to US national security. What are the implications of your findings for the United States and for US defense strategy?
LA: So in the latter half of our paper, we look at what the implications of our findings are for US defense strategy and we divide that up. We look at that in three different lenses. The first has to do with escalation risk. We've seen that this kind of cuts both ways for the US. On one hand, there are risks associated with some of our allies being more forward-leaning, like the United Kingdom or Poland, because we have Article 5: commitments to those allies. But we also learned in our interviews that to some degree, these more forward-leaning allies have been a benefit to us because we're able to learn from what they're able to do with Ukraine. We're able to leverage these allies' more permissive authorities. We also looked at the implications for US defense strategy from the burden-sharing perspective. In this area, this is a really good news story, and I'm sure we'll hear more about that at the Washington summit. As of July of last year, Europeans had actually overtaken the United States in all areas of support to Ukraine, including military support.
But of course, now we know this is likely to be a longer-term conflict and we'll have to continue or even raise the level of military support to Ukraine. So there are risks for the United States associated with whether or not European allies can deliver on those commitments, especially in the short term, and considerations for the US about what we need to do, what we can do to help them to meet those while they're also trying to fill their own stockpiles, modernize their own capabilities, and deliver on the requirements for NATO's new family of plans. The third area that we looked at had to do with US leadership and posture in Europe. Across the board, we heard from all of the allies close to the eastern flank and further to the west that the US presence still matters. The US troop presence on the ground and the enablers still matter for both the capacity to deliver command and control for all the assistance going into Ukraine, but also for reassuring allies that we've got their backs because they need to take some more risks for their own national security in delivering more and more military assistance to Ukraine in the short term.
RL: John, can you give us a snapshot for folks who may not be familiar with it: the scale and the presence of the US military footprint supporting this effort in Ukraine, in the European theater?
JD: The footprint is fairly significant. It's grown since February 2022. Lisa and I had a chance in our interviews to visit Wiesbaden, which is kind of the center of gravity in Germany for the American effort, at least from a command and control perspective. There, in the war's earliest days, the US set up sort of an ad hoc Security Assistance Group Ukraine. Lisa mentioned how it was born out of the 18th Airborne Corps initially, and a US Army Europe ended up providing a lot of the manpower and personnel for that initial ad hoc SAGU entity.
It has since then gone through a revitalization. It's been redesigned, and now it's got a structure of just over 400 people, consisting mostly of Americans. But there's also a sizable European allied presence or element in that SAGU, especially British personnel. There's a large contingent, as I mentioned now, at Wiesbaden. There's also American efforts to help move the material through Ramstein that comes from across the ocean and get that into Poland. Elements of the US logistics backbone led by the 21st Theater Sustainment Command based in Germany are assisting with that as are other active units that are forward stationed over in Europe. The effort that the Americans have undertaken here is significant, and I think although our European allies, especially the Brits, have expressed some willingness to step in if the Americans can't fulfill this leadership role, Lisa and I, nor even the Brits, think they have the the capacity, the scale, to do this in the way the Americans have. One thing that our military is really expert at, and it's been this way for decades, really since the earliest years of the Cold War,
is being able to move military personnel and material around the world. We've got two oceans and we've got an ocean on either side. Our ability to get people and things worldwide is really second to none in the world, and certainly in the Alliance. We've really leveraged that in the European context: being able to move the material at scale across the ocean first through Ramstein and other ports, airports of entry, and then into Poland and other neighboring countries and onward into Ukraine has been significant. That really can't be replicated by any European ally.
RL: You mentioned some of the success stories. Lisa, you had mentioned Poland and Poland's military support and also humanitarian support. I believe Poland has taken in more Ukrainian refugees than any other country since the beginning of the war. John, you mentioned British support and the Brits have done quite a bit as far as training the Ukrainian military. I know in my own personal and professional experiences that, just as you said John, the Brits have the interest in this, but it really comes down to a capacity issue. Where the US military has tens or dozens of people looking at one one certain problem set, in many cases, the Brits have one or two people. If one of those is away or deployed or on leave, then that doesn't leave very much as far as coverage. So there very much is this issue within the NATO construct and within bilateral and multilateral cooperation that the United States just has many more people looking at and dealing with these issues on a daily basis, whereas a lot of our allies, they just simply do not have the capacity.
JD: Rick, that's exactly right. In fact, if you look at sort of the defense investment plans, even the defense strategy plans or defense strategies, of most of our leading European allies, thinking here of the French, the Brits, the Germans, the Italians, maybe the Poles, and the Spaniards as well, they've been making a really focused effort over the last decade to invest in capability often at the expense of capacity. Now that, in one sense, is great because it means they can interoperate with us. They can operate side by side with us on the battlefield in the aerospace and at sea. That's very helpful to be able to operate side by side with us. But in a post-February 2022 era, we are facing the challenge of what the military calls LSCO. It's a great Pentagon acronym for large scale combat operations: LSCO. In that kind of environment, we need both capability and capacity.
And here we see our European allies will remain challenged probably through the end of the decade. Now, some of them, such as the Germans, have got plans on the books to expand their manpower. The Poles are probably going to build what will ultimately be the largest army outside of Turkey in NATO Europe, but these efforts are gonna unfold over coming-years. Maybe we have a window while the Russian ground forces are down and out, thanks to Ukrainian efforts, but we need to see our European allies step up their efforts, not merely in terms of capability, but now capacity because large scale combat is back.
RL: Lisa, back over to you. Looking forward, looking into the future, where do you see European allied support to Ukraine go from here? What can be done better?
LA: I want to link this answer to the comments that John just made, because none of the allies, the big ones, the UK, Germany, or France could have the capacity that we have. But one British scholar told me that from his perspective, the UK, France, and Germany could develop the capacity to do this if they could overcome some of the long-known hurdles that we know around European defense cooperation on the strategy side, the industrial side, et cetera. So this long-term conflict is affordable for European economies and there is capacity. It's about figuring out how to leave how to make sure that it delivers more than the sum of its parts. A number of our recommendations revolve around continuing US leadership in this effort, even as we better leverage the multilateral structures and tools like giving NATO more of a role in the coordination. But of course, we need to continue the US leadership, especially while our European allies are focused on building up that capacity and of modernizing their capabilities at scale and taking care of some of the obstacles around military mobility and being able to move people and things across the continent, as John said.
We also make recommendations that have to do with strengthening forward-based military and civilian resources that are important for reassurance in the NATO context, as well as for the coordination and communication that's required with allies across the continent. In some ways even though the European Union and NATO were sidestepped at the beginning of this and the choice was made to set up ad hoc, new institutional structures, this has only been possible because of the decades long relationship we have with these allies in the NATO context. The trust that has developed between the allies and the daily habits of working together. Then we also have some a set of recommendations around production and industry. It is going to be a long-term conflict, so we encourage the European adoption of defense production laws and regulations that could enable government direction of defense-production priorities and peacetime in limited circumstances, of course. We also know that we need to be able to facilitate longer term such as decades-long procurement contracts. This, we think, could be done by leveraging some of the European Union and NATO budgetary authority as collateral.
Finally, we have a series of recommendations that have to do with learning from one another and better engaging allied personnel in the US national security establishment, especially those with experiences and places and contexts that are off limits to American personnel. Of course, this involves more sharing of intelligence and information; and better engaging with Ukrainian war veterans, especially those that are no longer able to serve on active duty: to help improve the training realism at Allied training facilities, both to improve training for Ukrainians, but also to learn from them and improve training for our own forces.
RL: This has been a conversation with John Deni and Lisa Aronsson. John, Lisa, it's been a pleasure speaking with you both. Thank you.
LA: Thanks for including us.
JD: Thanks, Rick.