HUDSON INSTITUTE NATO IS NOT READY FOR WAR 1
POLICY MEMO
NATO Is Not Ready for War:
Assessing the Military Balance
between the Alliance and Russia
CAN KASAPOGLU
Senior Fellow (Nonresident), Hudson Institute
June 2024
Part 1: Assessing the Russian
Geopolitical Threat to NATO
The Russian Military Is
Prepared for a Long War
Through his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir
Putin has made clear that the freedom and security of Europe
depend on the West’s ability to deter and defend against
Russia. Unfortunately, while Russia is taking enormous losses
in Ukraine, it is learning and rapidly reconstituting its military.
On the eve of the Washington summit, the Kremlin’s ability to
threaten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with military
force is real and pressing.
Russia’s military policy to wear down Ukraine and the
West by sustaining a prolonged war depends on a
stable wartime economy footing, a resilient defense
industry, and three principal warfighting capabilities: artillery,
heavy armor, and manpower. Like the Soviet Red Army,
Putin’s combat formations rely on mass firepower, large
amounts of heavy armor, and massed troop formations with
favorable force-to-terrain and force-on-force ratios. In the
meantime, drone and missile strikes terrorize Ukrainian
population centers.
Russia’s economic resiliency may also continue to cause
trouble for NATO. While Moscow has written off the $300
billion that Western nations have frozen,
2
it holds roughly $580
billion in foreign currency and gold reserves.
3
This financial
cushion helps Russia continue investing heavily in its military.
Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s defense expenditures
have fluctuated between roughly 4 and 6 percent of its gross
domestic product (GDP), significantly higher than the NATO
average in recent decades. And Russia’s military expenditures
have proven highly resilient to economic fluctuations
compared to China and the West, which have invested a
lower percentage of their GDPs in defense despite having
stronger economies (see figure 1).
