NATO has just announced another key hub in Romania, second to its existing one in Poland. This will help get aid and equipment to Ukraine faster, but the alliance has long faced serious logistics bottlenecks.
The Mandiner portal writes about an incident recalled by retired U.S. General Ben Hodges when dozens of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles passed through a Polish train station in 2017. The vehicles were too tall to fit under the roof, causing turrets of some of the vehicles to tear off after hitting the metal awning above them.
No one was injured, but the incident resulted in thousands of dollars in damage, and 10 combat vehicles were temporarily disabled. It also clearly showed that Europe’s infrastructure is not prepared to quickly move large numbers of heavy military equipment.
Credible — and reliable — defense capabilities cannot be based on a fragmented, economically vulnerable, and militarily unprotected telecommunications system, military expert Ferenc Vukics told the portal. This was also blatantly demonstrated when a damaged railway bridge in northern Germany paralyzed ammunition shipments to Ukraine for weeks, as it was the only rail connection to that port.
Vukics concludes that Europe has been demobilized not only in weapons but also in strategic thinking in recent decades. Until this changes, military Schengen and ambitious mobility plans alone will not solve the problem, he says.
NATO’s logistics system remains tailored to peacetime and, in a crisis, produces delays rather than rapid response. It was only after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that it became clear that European rearmament alone was not enough.
Not only are modern tanks and self-propelled guns needed, but they also need to be able to be delivered to the eastern flank within days.
The difficulty of this was illustrated when France was unable to send its Leclerc tanks to Romania via the shortest land route, via Germany. German authorities deemed the tanks too heavy for the infrastructure, so the shipment was shipped from Marseille across the Mediterranean to Greece and then transported by rail. What started as a quick show of force turned into a weeks-long logistical detour.
EU estimates currently suggest that it could take up to 45 days for a NATO force to reach allies near the Russian or Ukrainian borders from strategic ports. New plans for military mobility aim to reduce this to three to five days.
According to German Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, everything should work like “Swiss clockwork,” because deterrence is only credible if it is quick and predictable.
In early 2022, few Western leaders believed that Vladimir Putin would actually attack. According to Hodges, the speed of decision-making is a key issue: when to issue the mobilization order, when to open the ammunition depots, when to start the convoys.
This also requires that European leaders and the American president interpret the threat in the same way.
NATO does not officially release figures, but in the event of a war, diplomatic sources say that 200,000 troops, 1,500 tanks and more than 2,500 armored vehicles would need to be redeployed from the United States, Canada and Britain. Although the Americans have made great improvements in mapping European routes, the shortcomings are still staggering: narrow tunnels, weak bridges, dangerous track gradients, and different railway gauges.
This is why the 24 billion euro Rail Baltica project is underway in the Baltic states, and in Spain, the different gauges are also causing serious problems. Transshipment everywhere means a loss of time and creates “choke points” that are ideal targets in a modern missile war.
Germany is particularly vulnerable. The country’s geographical location makes it an unavoidable transit area, with around 37,000 U.S. troops stationed there, while the state of its infrastructure is critical in many places. The partial collapse of the Carola Bridge in Dresden has become a symbol of the continent’s infrastructure crisis.
The EU has identified 2,800 critical points, of which 500 are priority projects. NATO member states have pledged to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense by 2035, of which 1.5 percent can go to infrastructure, and Germany is preparing a €500 billion renovation program. The question is whether this will be fast enough.
In peacetime, military convoys must comply with customs and labor regulations, such as driving hours for truck drivers. Of course, in times of war, these obstacles disappear – but by then it’s too late, which is why the idea of a “military Schengen” arose to standardize and accelerate troop movements, Mandiner writes.
Although Germany, Poland and the Netherlands have already taken steps, paperwork still varies from country to country, and NATO still relies on paper-based documents due to cyber threats.
Ferenc Vukics points to the deeper causes of the problems, saying that NATO’s current logistical difficulties are not primarily technical, but rather historical and conceptual. Until the end of the Cold War, the so-called dual-use infrastructure was a given in Europe:
“Ports, highways, bridges, and train stations were designed from the start to be suitable for military purposes if necessary,” he says. States accumulated reserves of food, fuel, ammunition, and industrial raw materials sufficient for years, and industry could be quickly converted to war production in times of crisis.
This way of thinking gradually disappeared after the Cold War. Economic efficiency, just-in-time supply systems and peacetime planning pushed defense considerations into the background. Vukics cites as an example that “in 2009, Germany even removed traffic signs indicating routes suitable for military vehicles.”
The consequences of this can now be quantified: Making the ports suitable for military use alone would cost €15-€20 billion, and restoring the entire transport and logistics system would require an investment of hundreds of billions.
However, the costs are a must, because without a unified, secure European infrastructure, military mobility is simply not possible, warns Vukics.
