European allies race missile projects as delivery timelines remain uncertain
NATO’s proposed sequence would apply only after a Russian military attack on allied Europe. The reporting identifies two constraints on the plan: European political acceptance of offensive operations inside Russia and the availability of deep-strike weapons in sufficient numbers. Grynkewich hosted the alliance’s first Deep Strike Symposium in June, where top officers and officials from across NATO discussed the subject and took part in a war game. The topic was one few attendees would have addressed openly until recently.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were forcing NATO to rethink how it would counter a Russian attack. For decades, protecting NATO’s European territory centered on blocking an advance. After almost five years of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, NATO strategists said a Russian invasion would not be thwarted by merely impeding an advance. They said deterring the Kremlin’s conventional forces now required more active prevention, or “denial”: strikes not only against troops that might cross borders, but against bases, supply depots and industrial facilities behind the front line on Russian territory.
Grynkewich recently set out this approach in a speech on his “theory of victory.” NATO’s defensive forces would first block the initial wave of an attack and then blunt follow-on action. If the offensive continued, he told a Warsaw audience, “we will break the warfighting system engaged against us” by hitting both advancing forces and “anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.” Escalating to nuclear weapons was not part of the strategy.
The plans described in the reporting aim to make deep-strike attacks essentially automatic after a Russian military attack and to clarify why stockpiling such weapons is necessary. Military leaders across NATO now accept “denial” as doctrine, but many strategists doubt that European political leaders would accept a deep-strike response. Nico Lange, a former chief of staff in Germany’s Defense Ministry, described the divide between military planners and political decision-makers. Lange said, “There is a disconnect between the military planning that is reasonable to defend against Russia—which definitely includes offensive components—and the political decision makers, who believe defense is just putting up a wall or readying a drone wall.”
Central to the concept is highly precise deep-strike weaponry at both high-end and lower-cost levels. The reporting defined “deep” as ranging from around 100 miles to hundreds of miles behind the front line. Long-range missiles, rockets and drones could be used against remote airfields, army compounds and other military targets, as well as Russian industrial facilities, critical infrastructure and resource bases thousands of miles from NATO borders.
The United States has recently been upgrading and extending its precision deep-strike array, including Tomahawk cruise missiles and Atacms rockets, while developing new systems. European allies have lagged behind, according to the reporting, and are racing to field new models and boost their small stocks of Storm Shadow, Scalp and Taurus cruise missiles. Across Europe, at least 48 new low-cost cruise-missile projects involving 20 manufacturers have been announced, according to Fabian Hoffmann, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies who specializes in missiles. Hoffmann said delivery timing remains an open question. Many projects will not materialize, he said, and even those that progress will need years.
Missile classifications in the reporting’s graphic
| Classification | Additional specification |
|---|---|
| Medium-range tactical ballistic missile | — |
| Long-range, subsonic cruise missile | — |
| Surface-to-surface tactical ballistic missile | — |
| Ground-launched long-range cruise missile | Length: Estimated between 39 to 45 feet |
The missile graphic’s source note credited The Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies for Tomahawk, Designation-Systems for PrSM, the United States Army Acquisition Support Center, the Federation of American Scientists, Collective Awareness to UXO, Missile Threat for Atacms, MBDA and GlobalSecurity.org for Storm Shadow, Saab for Taurus, and Army Recognition for Atacms speed and Taurus operation date.
Attack-drone classifications in the reporting’s graphic
| Entry classification | Associated origin |
|---|---|
| Cruise-missile-style attack drone | Russia (based on Iranian design) |
| Cruise missile and attack drone hybrid | Russia (based on Iranian design) |
The attack-drone graphic’s source note separately cited The International Institute for Strategic Studies for Geran-4 and Geran-5 specifications, Deagel for Banderol specifications, Drone-Warfare for Geran-4 operation date, Army Recognition for Geran-5 operation date, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies for Banderol operation date.
The approach—often described as hitting the archer rather than shielding from arrows—is one Ukraine has taken against Russia. Using increasingly powerful weapons, including the domestically developed Flamingo cruise missiles, Kyiv has struck distant Russian military and economic assets such as rocket-fuel producers, drone-battery plants, oil refineries and data centers. The reporting said the United States deployed a similar approach against Iran this year.
Russia has meanwhile launched a much larger number of long-range strikes on Ukraine, mixing pinpoint attacks on strategic targets with widespread destruction of civilian assets. Ukraine’s ambassador to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, said the country has run short of Western-supplied interceptors and increasingly relies on deep-strike “proactive defense” to hit Russia. “Air defense is like a painkiller—it can alleviate the symptoms—but you need to target the source of the pain,” Getmanchuk told a conference on Ukrainian defense.
Polish Maj. Gen. Ireneusz Nowak said “defense also means striking back” and called precision deep-strike attacks a crucial part of that approach in an interview. “We definitely would want to strike the defense-industrial base” in a fight with Russia, he said. Nowak also argued that deep precision strike must be treated as deterrence, saying that if Ukraine had the capability early in the war, the fighting would not have “resulted in trench battles like in World War I.”
Ukraine has also demonstrated why large supplies of precision weapons are necessary as conflicts wear on and new targets emerge. Fixed assets such as factories are relatively straightforward to target, but they may be relocated to several hidden locations, as Ukraine has done. Mobile targets such as launchers can be harder to strike because they are small and continually reposition. “What we’ve seen is that you don’t want to be caught in a high-intensity conflict where your adversary has access to deep arsenals of long-range strike capabilities and not have them yourself,” Hoffmann said.
Deep-strike attacks date back to World War II, when both sides relied on manned bombers. One U.S. bombing mission struck Nazi-controlled oil fields far inside Romania. The reporting described Germany’s V1 and V2 as the world’s first targeted long-range military rockets; Germany used them against Britain and infrastructure including the Belgian port of Antwerp, an Allied supply node after D-Day. None of those methods was reliably precise.
During the Cold War, ballistic missiles grew more accurate but were large and complex to fire. The reporting traced modern deep precision strike’s dramatic debut to the first Gulf War in 1991, when the United States fired hundreds of Tomahawks. Those missiles flew horizontally using small jet engines rather than rockets like ballistic missiles. Since then, the United States, its allies and adversaries have expanded cruise-missile arsenals, developed precision rockets such as Atacms fired from U.S. Himars trucks and blurred the lines between drones and missiles.
NATO commanders cited in the reporting said they must quickly build deep-strike arsenals to prepare for conflict and, in their hope, deter it. Nowak said the message to Russia needs to be: “Don’t do anything stupid, because we can punish you.” He added, “But to be credible, we need to have those capabilities.”