Poland-US Crisis Planning Seminar and Strategic Choices Exercise by Mark Gunzinger and Jacob Cohn, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
During the recent NATO Summit in Warsaw, NATO announced its decision to station four multinational battalions on its eastern flank, one in each of the Baltic states and Poland. Will this initiative help create a credible deterrent posture in Europe in light of a revisionist Russia? Or, are initiatives such as increasing NATO’s air and missile defense capacity and creating a complex of long-range, ground-based precision fires also needed to counter emerging anti-access/area-denial threats to the region?
In May 2016, CSBA, teamed with Poland’s National Centre for Strategic Studies, led a tabletop exercise to explore these and other issues. During the exercise, three joint Poland-U.S. teams used CSBA’s Strategic Choices Tool to create a military force that, by 2026, could strengthen NATO’s force posture in the Baltic region. Each team assessed their upgraded forces in a table-top exercise against a conflict scenario set in 2027 that challenged the security of Poland and the Baltic states. The May 2016 exercise built on the results of a similar October 2015 crisis response seminar, which explored new operational concepts and capability priorities to defend Eastern European “frontline” states.