The Russian Threat and the Apparently Endless Words Vs. Deeds Problem

If you take the news at face value, Russia is a major threat to Europe — and beyond. If Putin wins in Ukraine, the whole continent is threatened. NATO faces a desperate challenge to contain the Russian menace.

So let’s look at how NATO countries are working to meet the danger.

Canada (a founding NATO member) has warned for years that a clash is coming with Russia over control of the Arctic. This article was published last month:

Seeing the threat coming over the horizon, Canada has been preparing for the fight. Back in 2015, for example, the Canadian Navy joined wargames in the Mediterranean to simulate a battle with Putin’s warships. Unfortunately, though, the Canadian flagship was unable to reach the exercise: HMCS Athabaskan, a destroyer, was then 43 years old, and kept breaking down. Here’s a description of the ship from a technician who served aboard her for seven years: “It was garbage. Everything was always breaking.”

You can find that quote here, in an article titled, “The sinking of the Canadian Navy.” Today, Canada is building a new class of destroyers, and hopes to begin putting some of them to sea by the 2030s. Until then, however, the Canadian Navy’s surface fleet is made up of frigates and coastal patrol vessels; Canada doesn’t currently have a destroyer it can put to sea. It also has a few diesel-electric submarines. Here’s the environment where that navy of patrol boats and diesel submarines would fight, if war came:

Or consider the current strength of the British Navy:

The Royal Navy’s surface fleet is now smaller than the navies of the two other main European Nato members’ navies – France and Italy – being on paper able to field just 16 major surface combatants, comprising two aircraft carriers, six destroyers and just eight frigates.

In reality, the availability of the 16 major surface combatants in the UK fleet is far lower, with the number of Type 23 frigates available for operations this year fluctuating between five and six hulls at any given time…

The number of Type 45 air defence destroyers is similarly reduced as vessels are taken offline to undergo rectification work to long-standing propulsion issues. As of 31 October 2024, of a fleet of six, two Type 45 destroyers were immediately available, or deployed.

Just eight destroyers or frigates were available for operations at the end of October 2024.

Eight warships that can put to sea, a terrifying global deterrent.

The German Navy? Frigates and corvettes. But the Germans, working to prepare for a more dangerous world, have committed to an increase in military spending that brings them racing forward to 2% of GDP.

The Polish Navy, on the Baltic and also bordering Ukraine, uniquely in the Russian crosshairs if Ukraine falls? A surface fleet of patrol boats and…two frigates, both built in the 1980s. But they’re building a third frigate, so. They also have one diesel-electric submarine, which was broken for a while, but they got it working again.

In December of 2023, the United States announced that it would begin major military operations against the Houthis, who have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea with considerable success. As that linked story says, the US Navy hasn’t been able to keep a carrier strike group in the region all the time, but now the USS Harry S. Truman has returned; recently, a ship in the carrier group accidentally shot down one of the carrier’s F-18s.

As an article about the fight in the Red Sea explained last year, describing a decade of failed shipbuilding projects, “The Navy is struggling to meet some of its operational requirements in part because it simply doesn’t have all the ships it expected.”

A parallel security effort in the Red Sea has been led separately by the European Union, under the command of a Greek flag officer, Rear Admiral Vasileios Gryparis:

The mission's four frigates from Greece, Germany, France and Italy have been patrolling across a vast area extending from the southern Red Sea to the northwestern Indian Ocean, twice the size of the European Union's territory.

Gryparis said it will ask European authorities to engage more battle ships (sic) in the Red Sea.

"(We need) at least twice the number we have now," he said.

So a world menaced by the threat of war has gotten Poland’s one submarine working again, and hopes that Canada will have a destroyer by sometime in the next decade. A coalition of nations that can’t keep enough warships at sea to defeat the Houthis is readying itself for the possibility of a head-to-head conflict with Putin’s Russia. Fortunately, the Russian Navy also isn’t that hot, but the protection afforded by Russian weakness is different than the protection that would be created by NATO strength.

Apparently the real conflict is the war against seriousness. The performative urgency and panicked rhetoric, the only apparent behavior of the global political class, is paired with…not much shipbuilding. We seem to be living in the age of Potemkin everything. The ratio of talk to teeth speaks loudly.