Baltic States – CIS, Legislation, Russia, Technology, Transport, USA

''In Ukraine, we have had at least two, maybe three of these cycles [already, where] they will back off, and there will be a long kind of quiet period, and then they will spike back up,'' Hodges points out, cites LETA.

He believes that the Russians could re-escalate quickly in Ukraine — or anywhere along an arc from the Arctic to the Baltic to the Black Sea. Thus, this requires the U.S. to respond with a degree of rapidity, flexibility, and intimate cooperation with allies that exceeds anything required in the Cold War, or even in Afghanistan or Iraq, Hodges says.

There are three missing pieces, Hodges said: Secure FM radios so U.S. troops can talk securely and to allies without being jammed; shared data that allows troops to see a common operating picture (COP), so that U.S. and allied commanders see the same situation on their screens; secure digital networks to call in artillery fire by linking human observers and radars to the guns themselves.

If the Russians move, “things are going to happen fast,” he said. “We’re not going to have six months to get ready…and then deploy into Latvia. It’s going to be come as you are, plug and play,'' Hodges emphasized.

According to him, it is particularly important to get a deterrent force in place before the Russians slam the door on reinforcements. Anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles based on Russian or Russian-occupied soil can already range well into NATO airspace and waters. If a shooting war were in the offing, Hodges said, “the investments the Russians have made in Kaliningrad and Crimea in access denial would make it very, very risky and costly to try to bring capabilities up into the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.”

“In order to deter a situation where they might decide to deny access, launch a snap exercise, and Little Green Men [Russian special forces] start appearing in Latvia, for example, or they start to seal off the gap [of Polish and Lithuanian territory] between Kaliningrad and Belarus, we’ve got to be there [already],” Hodges said. “We’ve got to be training with our allies, improving interoperability, and we’ve got to be able to move quickly [to] provide a deterrent option before it grows into a crisis.”