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Prelude: Recalling Operation Long Thrust
On August 20, 1961, an American armored battle group of the 18th Infantry Regiment stationed in West Germany crossed the heavily militarized border at Helmstedt and rolled its way approximately 100 miles along the autobahn across Soviet-controlled East Germany into West Berlin. Too small to be an offensive threat, but formidable enough to be serious, Operation Long Thrust skirted the fine line between resolute deterrence and go-to-war provocation, and allowed the United States to avoid becoming militarily embroiled with strident adversaries in East Germany and the Soviet Union.[1][2]
That bold demonstration was part of a difficult, and potentially incendiary, period that nearly all experts and observers thought had expired with the end of the Cold War in 1991. As the post-Cold War period unfolded, many thought that a new Russia would, with fits and starts, join the Western community of nations, while the Central and Eastern European lands traditionally caught between Russia and the West would finally find security and maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors.
More than half a century after Operation Long Thrust, a modern-day version of this forgotten Cold War deterrence operation reprised itself in Eastern Europe as the United States instituted Operation Atlantic Resolve. Russia's illegal invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, as well as the continued beleaguerment of eastern Ukraine by Russian-supported proxies, have caused troubling clouds to loom over Eastern Europe, including over Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, three key North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Baltic allies. In response to Russia's actions, the U.S. military in April 2014 sent three modest paratrooper companies from the storied 173rd Airborne Brigade into these geographically vulnerable countries to show allied solidarity and support, as well as to convey an unambiguous message to Russia not to consider any offensive or subversive action against them.3 In February 2015, Operation Dragoon Ride, in another determined show of assurance and deterrence, elements of the U.S. Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment and British forces rolled through the three Baltic states all the way to Narva, an Estonian city dominated by ethnic Russians that lies just 90 miles from St. Petersburg.4 There they celebrated Estonia's Independence Day. While Russian officials fulminated and state-controlled press decried the maneuvers5, informed Russian leaders...