A Finnish perspective on Russian military build up and NATO

Thought this was quite interesting:

http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/88963/TheDevelopmentOfRussian_netti.pdf?sequence=2

Of particular note is the concern that NATO would not defend Baltic States in case of a Russian take over.

Other notable aspects are comments regarding European disarmament and in Baltic region the disarmament of Sweden.

In many ways, Eastern Europe is right for the picking – most Eastern European airforces cannot muster a dozen operational jets and many are no longer capable of fielding coherent ground forces either.

In fact the standard “army” in Europe seems to be a couple of brigades with little or no armour and next to no artillery.

NATO membership is only a security guarantee if the US is willing to enforce it.

With US’ attention turning to Asia, this may not be the case in the future.

From an aerospace perspective, it makes one wonder whether purchases of small amounts of 4.5-5th generation fighters by European Air Forces is at all viable.

These sort of aircraft are complete overkill in COIN ops yet their extremely small numbers mean they are also pointless in high tech conventional war.

It also puts into question the running down of Eastern European airforces – the Eastern European airforces that are in NATO field 230 odd combat aircraft about half of which are Polish. And this number will decline with retirement of Polish Su-22s (only replacement may be drones) and draw down of Romanian MiG-21s.

Of these only 76 are modern 4th generation (JAS-39, F-16C/D). There are 60 odd MiG-29s. The rest is Su-22 (retired about 2018), MiG-21, Su-25 or subsonic limited utility L-159.

Rebuilding any sort of capability would take a long time (decades given current lead times) especially in Eastern Europe.