In this event. I was going to add a special welcome to be here today. Michael who is the under secretary for defense policy. As some of you may know its great to see him back in town. So im going to say a few words before we let our experts loose. I want to say why this is important and why we are doing this. This is a big summer of exercises in europe. Nato will conduct a number of exercises as well. This is in response to russia that continues to be assertive in and around europe as well. It includes with military power. A recuring is a special interest to security community. You can tell us about growing capabilitie capabilities. It has given us clues to russias ability to rapidly mobilizing and integrating ground air and sea power. It has also given us a wind about the use of key capabilities including the yaus of Ballistic Missiles and nuclear weapons. This is important not only for us here in washington but also nato and other allied capitals for us to all keep an eye on. This provides a public preview of what could be expected in the coming months and what the longterm implications are for u. S. , nato and all of the members in terms of deterrence for the european continent moving forward. This forms part of the long standing work on defense in Northern Europe. We focused on a number of key issues including nato cooperation to meet some of thee these challenges. We have conducted a range of activities including war games. We have lead fact finding de delegations to the regions. And actually six weeks ago in Northern Europe which featured all of the baltic defense ministers. So this Panel Discussion is really we will watch it closely using our capabilities and Forensics Research labs which tracked in ukraine and syria and the events using Digital Tools to uncover important facts from the ground that are some times easy to miss for a policy audience. Some of the work could be picked up outside this room. Of course none of this work we are doing would have been possible with our close partnersh partnership. Thank you so much to you and to the ministry for making this work possible and bringing some of these perspectives to washington for discussion. We have a great panel lined up for today. Im sure you will find this fascinating and lively. We look forward to bringing you into the conversation during the q and a session. We are Live Streaming this event. If you want to engage with us on social media use hash tag. He is an expert on russian and regional repairs. Before becoming the editor and chief he served as the newspapers correspondent at a crucial time of Political Developments in russia. He is one of the leading voices for the value of in europe. The floor is yours. Thank you for being here today. [ applause ] thank you for putting together this extremely interesting seminar this morning and its very timely as we see generates a lot of interest and questions. Allow me to be going back a little bit from where we are today. We have to see the bigger picture. This is only part of it. Russia is the only country today in the world who has National Strategy to confront nato as an enemy and perhaps even destroying nato and the United States in your atlantic area built by the leadership of the United States. Russia is the only country who constantly exercises and strategically building up muscle memory for total war or recent exercises at least since 2009 had elements. Of course this suits perfectly to their own historical roots. They said the only real allies are the army. Perhaps you could add nukes as well and of course this all makes sense in con sal consolidation. It gives the best example and the formation that russia has not changed since the break up of the soviet union. They had exercises already in 1973. But what is different from times of 81 and 84 the only element i see what has changed since then is the location of front line. Instead denmark and we have now the Baltic States and poland as front linked nations. It was a very interesting paper who is now of u. S. Navy. In 1983 he was a student at the Monterey School researching security aspects of the baltic sea. That time he stressed that since the end of world war ii had a clear strategic advantage. This created a situation where they are waiting nuclear war. What is most striking is the fact that every nation gave to security environment 34 years ago feels as if it were written yesterday. He concluded, and i gloat him here. The alliance must rid itself of the idea that any defensive response perceive as provocation by the kremlin. They can constitute to aggression. This was written in 1983. Hardly anything has changed. I would like to conclude with very strong formation that we have seen strong response from nato since russian aggression both actually in 2008 against georgia and specifically since 2014 against it is to defend its allies by article 5 and also not only in there but building up to terrence what is important so then we see these in our borders. Of course we on our the political debates we are firmly believing in our own necessity of our side and the best we can and allocated to defense this year. I tell you there is no Political Force who argues against these thoughts to work perhaps in terms of increasing the Defense Budget if its really needed. It makes of course the quality of political decisions much higher than otherwise. These were a few of my remarks. I hope to hear very interesting debate today. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. My assignment today is to provide additional context for understanding of what we may be seeing. It sends it along very much. The message is that you heard from marco and what youll be hearing from me is why these things dont exist. Understand them and interpret them. There are a lot of other considerations that we need to Pay Attention to including history. What i thought i would do then is start with a few words about what we know about the exercise itself and then look at some of the immediate precursors to it and what those precursors some of the earlier may suggest about what we will see now and then say a few words at the end about some of the issues it may raise for the rest of us, what we should be paying attention to. What im sure many in the audience know is a joint strategic exercise. It is planned to take place in western russia. It will be a multinational exercise encome passing forces. It is for reasons ill explain in more detail to coincide or ov overlap with other Training Drills which may not be formally identified but look clearly linked to them. Ill come back to this. Its overall size is uncertain on detail but all indications are it could be very very large and may be the largest one we have seen since the end of the cold war. One has to do with what exercises can tell us a about the thinking of political leaders. What is it they worry about . What kinds of conflicts do they think should be planned for . What kinds of messages they want to convey to adversaries and more. And secondly, what exercises can suggest or remind us about broader trends in the security environment. In general in Russian Defense planning in particular. As i mentioned, these dont take place in a vacuum. What i will do is simply to say a few words about what we have seen in recent exercise history, Say Something about the issues this may raise for the president and then return and try to suggest what it is we should pay particular attention to especially in the broader European Security environment. First a bit of exercise history. They are regularly planned and announced. The two most recent ones took place in 2009 and 2013. The 2013 exercise has some aspects which are very much worth noting as we look ahead to this september. First of all theres a question of what its purpose was. It was characterized as an Anti Terrorist exercise. When you look at what happened it is pretty hard to believe that thats really all that this was about. Clearly it was exercising and testing mobilization and deployment and newly formed units of command and control arrangements and the like. I think well see a lot more of it this time. A second characteristic has to do with its size. 2013 russia was still following the document conventions of reporting upcoming exercises. They are not doing that anymore. Their declaration was that it was going to be on the order of 20,000 troops. There was several problems with this exercise. It appears the only thing they were announcing was the Ground Forces that were involved. In fact there were a lot of other troops that were involved. They were in lodgistic forces, railroad troops, interior ministry and the like. Those numbers were considerable. When you add those forces to the 22,000 you get about 70,000 in total there was a very large interior ministry involving a roughly 25,000 troops. If you include that the total comes close to 100,000. However much we decide there are a lot of closely linked activities of considerable size much larger than russia officially announced how large is not clear. Theres not going to be a notification this time. There are reports. It is larger than we have seen before. It is much larger than what we saw in 2013. What we could be seeing is the largest most ambitious exercise since the cold war. There are still constraints on them in the future, both economic and dem graph ir. Having said all of that is what general trends are. Its a force which is much more mobile, has more competent units which can move faster and quicker than we have seen before and in ways under quite plausible scenarios that can produce ratios along the borders in the regions that are quite unfavorable to nato. This is not a question of what Russian Forces look like against nato in general but scenarios that could cause trouble. A lot of western concerns both in the region from nato officials and here in washington. We will hear more about those from the panel so i wont go into great detale. Let me mention a couple. The most dramatic but not frequent is that it may be some kind of direct military action. I understand the reasons for this. It has happened before. There was some there was an exercise which followed by interventions in the borders. Same thing happened in 2008. Having said that i think direct military action personally is very unlikely. I dont think russia is looking to start a war with nato. I do worry about other things. One is that incidents along the border, provocations poking around the region. As a result possibility of accidents. You know, we are going to need and we will need to be careful about this. I hope they are too. I cant rule out the possibility of trouble associated with this. But even if none of that happens what then should we care about . I would mention a couple of things that we should pay particular attention to. One is simply the size and what this tells us about russian planning and defense planning and perspectives. Another is the scenario. There will be one thing which we describe to us. My guess is it will be deployment issues and particular command and control because there have been structural changes in the military districts in russia and in some of the units, what forces are involved, what roles they seem to play, to what extent they look like they reflect changes in the force structure for some period russia was moving away to smaller more mobile bre grades. They were more concerned about smaller local wars around their borders. They started to move back a bit creating new Larger Forces we will also need to talk about how good our own intelligence is. Well need to be thinking hard about this. Well be looking at this. One of the things well need to assess afterwards is what did we see . How much was received in advance. It would have implications for warning questions and how much warning can we expect to have if something twor go wrong. A final element it is about the idea to deescalate. Well have to Pay Attention to that too. Foonlly one final point. In addition to the operational purposes of exercises what are the messages you are intended to convey . Do they want to warn us we should leave them alone . The political message is defensive as they claim. Do they want to make us nervous and therefore accommodate in ways consistent with some of their other objectives in the region . Sorting them out will not be a simple matter but it is something to Pay Attention to and think about one final point, these issues, what it is we can expect from russia will not end with this either. Theres a lot of discussion about what it should look like and what it should pay. It is supposed to be determined and announced also in september. Let me leave it at that and turn it over to the panel. [ applause ] hi. I want to say theres no shortage of russia talk in this town. I think this is going to be an important and interesting conversation to have. To my left we have astonia. We have to his left major christian of norway. It formally served as secretary of defense for russia and ukrai ukraine. Ill go ahead and give the panelists about five minutes to run across introductions and well open it up to the floor. Okay. Thank you. I would like to thank the organizer for the event and for the people in the audience for your interest in this subject. They made an excellent introduction. We should Pay Attention to it. Secondly, what kind of attention is needed after all and thirdly what should be our sort of attitude towards this exercise. Later of course i would be happy to answer any questions. Whats important to note here is crimea. So from that point it will be important militarily. The exercise takes place in extreme proximity to territory. In fact the exercise activities we expect to surrounded territory and activity on behalf of the russians just as sort of referring to. We expect the size of the size to be it may be up from there. What the important to note here is just as he eluded to, in addition to that we sell the whole set. They are all direct today us. So well see a lot of exercise activity. Thirdly we have witnessed before that russians intend to fight and it will give us ample information on military development and on their political thinking. And during the exercise their readiness will be higher and their existing advantage in sort of time and space will be even further by that. We dont consider this to be a direct threat to us. We dont expect it to be a cover for an attack or something. We have to keep in mind its for sure that for the military and political for people. This is the kind of information they want to sort of test out it definitely has to get the deserved attention from the higher political military assurance. Considering the set up of the exercise the scenarios that we see being played out and the overall Strategic Thinking is not about just abstract readiness, but the exercise is certainly about the sort of Testing Community testing the ability to pursue its own goals and all about our ability to keep our deterrence credible. We have to be calm and we have to be flexible. We do have to do it and we certainly intend this to be the ways. We also have to do it in a way as an alliance and as countries in the region and particularly considering the bad things happening in august and september time frame. Well pass it down. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting norway to this event as well. I think one would have to understand what is happening north of norway on a daily basis as well before going into the exercise as well as use a few minutes to send some brief remarks about what the situation is north of norway. What we have seen the last couple of years is an increased activity when it comes to c power. It is increasing and a part of the russian doctrine is so go farther west. Together with this we know that we have also seen a russian modernization when it comes to sub marines that are more silent before. We have also seen weapons on board these sub marines that have longer range than before. This combination makes it so much more important to have a as muchuational awarene a situat awareness. When it comes to the air forces we have actually seen a reduced activity from the russian side in the north. A few years ago we saw a different type of formations. It has been reduced lately. We have not seen much of the aggressiveness that has been seen in the baltic sea. There is a difference between the russian behavior in the baltics as north of norway. Because of the sanctions and what have you the interactions has been reduced to almost nothing. We are still on the border guard. We are cooperating on the risk at sea. Be aware we also have a line between the joint Operations Headquarters which means that headquarters and the northern headquarters. We do tests every week. Lately it has not been used much. It is there for commanders to speak to commanders in case we have something coming up and we need to get any misunderstandings out of the way. So when it comes to the exercise its self. We are interested in seeing how the exercises linked to other exercises in the north. We also know that during fall at this time already we see an annual deployment from the russian navy going to the eastern going further east and the northeast. We understand that most of the exercise activity and probably facing towards astonia. We have part of the company. We would like more transparency. If russia could inform nato using the dhoonl inform it is something that would be very welcoming. Thank you so much. Ill mooef to efly. Thank you again to the coparticipants. I think caroline asked me to speck to someone in 2013 when they last occurred. Sitting in the pentagon at the time we watched a new defense minister come into office. He has only increased his power with russian society. He was know because of his we give lent of fema. So when he came into office one of the things we saw but an up p take m which is one of the piece. There were other regional occurring. He really put a loft pe he he also what he call to civilian leadership the staelt of readiness. They had four nap doubled in 2014. There were 20 in in. It went down to 11. It meant they didnt have to do these reg