In the final analysis, I was relieved that the Russians stood down, but they proved they can do this quickly and that it wouldn’t have taken much to go from an exercise to a real-world operation and cross that line in Donbas. Sometimes this area heats up as we saw most recently with the build-up of a 100,000 Russian forces along the line of demarcation between Crimea and the rest of the Ukraine. All these things happened and now Crimea has been annexed and there exists a continuing tension along the border in Donbas or what is often called a frozen conflict. Undermining a sovereign nation can be done without firing a shot through intimidation, spawning social or nationalistic unrest, capitalizing on social-media and utilizing the new domains of cyber and space in coordinated attacks that occur under the threshold of a NATO Charter Article 5. Personally, I don’t like the “little green men” expression, but I do appreciate and understand hybrid. This was accomplished through what David Kilcullen calls liminal warfare or essentially hybrid warfare by a different name. As a community of western allies and partners we were completely surprised. We should have seen this coming after the 2008 attack on Georgia but for some reason we didn’t. In fact, during the run-up to the Olympic Games in Sochi we had two ships in the Black Sea, but then out of the blue, came the illegal annexation of Crimea and the Russia Work Plan ground to a halt. Every year, it became a milestone event to build and approve the “Russia Work-Plan.” Everything done in collaboration with Russian Forces was approved at the Secretary of Defense level. In other words, “Virtual presence equals actual absence!” Eventually, the Russians got used to a US DDG entering and operating in the Black Sea.Īs this relationship progressed with the post-Soviet era Russian Federation, there was actual dialogue, we had joint military activities with their forces. When the Russians protested against the destroyer sailing in the Black Sea on a legitimate Montreux convention request, the response of the Sixth Fleet Commander at the time-Admiral Harry Harris was –“Well, send another one!” The important lesson learned here is that you have to be present for both your allies and partners to receive reassurance and to let others that want to challenge you know that you are going to be there with like-minded nations in solidarity. The Burke Class Destroyers have the ability to carry the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) and the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3)-the best ballistic missile interceptor in the world. We sent one of these destroyers then to the Black Sea for the first time and the Russians were not happy about it. The US DDG is really a versatile platform. It was our desire to use those ships in multi-mission capacity, not just for missile defense which is their primary mission, but to perform other multi-missions: anti-submarine warfare, anti-air warfare, maritime interdiction operations, etc. At that time, we were bringing the Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers to Rota, Spain as Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF). ![]() In 2010, I became a one-star admiral in charge of Submarine Group 8 in the Allied Submarine South that included the navies of the Southern Mediterranean and Black Sea region countries that operated submarines (Greece and Turkey). JF: My introduction to the Black Sea took place in early 2011. How do you see the transformation/the changes in the Russian way of warfare and what worries you about them? There is a term that I found very useful in this context coined by David Kilcullen in his most recent book where he talks about a special type of warfare that of liminal warfare - essentially ‘riding the edge’, exploiting the ambiguity of blurred lines of conflict to challenge an established order and exert control on key parts of the regional commons - practiced in a certain ecosystem, a geographical area ‘transitioning between two states of being…that are in limbo, that have ambiguous political, legal and psychological status’. OM: Seven years after the Crimea annexation, the Black Sea remains what has been called the ‘soft underbelly of NATO’. Sixth Fleet Commander, Submarine Group 8 and Commander, Submarines, Allied Naval Forces South. Over the last decade in Naples, Italy, he served in multiple major commands as Commander, Naval Forces Europe/Africa Commander Allied Joint Force Command, Naples Commander, U.S. ![]() SWJ Q&A with Admiral (Ret.) James Foggo, a distinguished Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). ‘Liminal or hybrid warfare is not going to result in great tank battles in the Fulda or Suwalki Gaps’
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