Will NATO upgrades be enough to deter Russian aggression?

The defense ministers of NATO’s 28 member countries met last week in Brussels to approve a range of upgrades to the alliance’s military capabilities. The improvements, which include increases in both troops and equipment, are in large part a response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, its alleged and continuing military incursion in eastern Ukraine, its ability to speedily mobilize large numbers of troops, and its escalating rhetoric about the use of nuclear weapons.

“We don’t seek a new arms race,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, noting the alliance’s goal was to protect itself, not to threaten Russia. “But we have to keep our nations safe. And we have to adapt when the world is changing.”

The NATO defense ministers tripled the size of the alliance’s response force, from 13,000 to as many as 40,000. They also added a highly mobile, multi-national “spearhead brigade” of 5,000 ground troops that could be deployed to any threatened NATO member within 48 hours.

The ministers also granted the alliance’s supreme commander in Europe, U.S. Air Force Gen. Phillip Breedlove, much more authority and latitude to mobilize and deploy the response force.

And during a visit to Estonia last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced the United States will preposition 250 tanks, armored vehicles, and other equipment across a half-dozen of NATO’s easternmost members that feel most at risk from Russia.

Experts on NATO policy and Baltic security issues agreed the military upgrades were a step in the right direction but likely don’t go far enough as a deterrent to Russian aggression.

“At the end of the day, we’re talking about prepositioning a brigade’s worth of equipment,” said Luke Coffey, a defense and NATO analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “We’re not even talking about basing the troops alongside the equipment. All of this is better than nothing and sends a signal, but we need to be realistic about what sort of real deterrent effect it will have.”

Russia has moved aggressively in the Baltic region in recent months. In December, it airlifted state-of-the art, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania. Although it eventually pulled the missiles back, the deployment clearly served as a demonstration of Russia’s military readiness to engage in the region.

“We let the Russians develop the impression that the Baltic states were kind of ‘NATO lite,’” said Edward Lucas of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe. “And that’s very dangerous because they see that western credibility is at stake in the Baltics and they also see that the Baltics were not properly defended.”

Lucas, in his report “The Coming Storm,” released last week by CEPA, argues geography makes NATO’s defense of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania not only difficult but impossible without the full cooperation of Sweden and Finland, both non-NATO countries.

“It’s easy for [the Russians] to try provocation, to see what happens,” Edwards told me. “If it succeeds, they’ll try another one. If it doesn’t succeed they can back off and say, ‘it wasn’t us.’ It’s a kind of low-risk environment for them and a high risk environment for us.”

Although NATO leaders gave Breedlove a certain degree of political preauthorization to respond to military threats, Lucas doesn’t think it’s likely the Russians will attempt a direct military invasion.

“I think it’s more likely they would try something that’s very ambiguous and hard to read, involving political upheavals … natural disasters, maybe something cyber, something involving civil unrest,” said Edwards. “And by the time you work out what they’re doing, it’s too late.”

According to Lucas, the Russians have a very large “toolbox” of both military and non-military capabilities from which to choose. Recent Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine has taken the form of cyber attacks, fomenting of political unrest. and intervention in “supposed support” for Russian separatists. He believes NATO should develop a similar wide-ranging set of capabilities to counter Russia’s.

“I don’t think the Russians are stupid, they’re not going to do an exact replica of what they’ve done before,” Edwards predicted. “But we’re already getting a sense of the things they’re capable of. And these are things that NATO’s not configured to deal with.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.