The British-Baltic Defense Model

Allied security is enhanced at top-level meetings but also through ground-level partnerships from warships and submersibles to high-tech labs.

In this summer of summits, all eyes are fixed on the air-conditioned conference halls as the great Western democracies talk about peace and war, and financing both. In the waters of the Baltic Sea and its littoral states meanwhile, the fighting men and women of European NATO are practicing what happens if (or when) it all goes wrong.

This doesn’t necessarily mean all-out war. Russia, China, and their authoritarian allies are focused on hybrid — or so-called grayzone — warfare that aims to hurt the West without provoking a response. One key area of risk is the West’s undersea lifelines of data and energy cables and pipelines, where attacks can cause profound societal damage.

So far, these attacks have been limited and yet they are becoming more serious, affecting undersea cables near Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland. Russia is widely held responsible, but China too has been accused.

Clearly, NATO needs to respond. So it’s encouraging to see the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) of 10 North European NATO allies cracking on with action to face the developing threat. Throughout June, the allies are joining the Nordic Warden exercise. This forms part of the wider NATO Baltic Operations Exercise (Baltops 24), the biggest such exercise so far, involving more than 30 allied warships.

Nordic Warden focuses on so-called critical undersea infrastructure that Russia and China have practiced sabotaging as part of a pressure campaign, or in the run-up to war. The West has warned that this could be considered an act of war, but in truth, it’s far from clear that the alliance has clear answers to such hybrid attacks even when the consequences are potentially ruinous to Western societies reliant on digital systems.

But allies can work together on protection, a need driven home by recent attacks. between Finland and Estonia, as well as several telecom cables torn last year.

While some have argued that Finnish and Swedish NATO accession has turned the Baltic Sea into a “NATO lake”, the reality is more complicated. Russia still has access to the sea via ports in St Petersburg and Primorsk, and the exclave of Kaliningrad remains an unresolved thorn in its neighbors’ defenses.

The UK, France, and others have invested in manned and unmanned naval systems to match the threat and have been working to build new agreements in areas like the North Sea and the Baltic.

Thus, the multi-national exercise to train rapid response to underwater incidents is a timely attempt to hone new tools in the Western arsenal, as part of the effort to counter wider hybrid threats across the Eastern Flank. It is exactly this kind of tactical collaboration that is required to build meaningful, long-term deterrence.

In addition to the hybrid responses, there are two more domains in which the UK and the Baltics see eye to eye. Strategically, Britain and its Baltic state NATO allies see European security in quite similar ways. This shared worldview encourages an activist approach to supporting Ukraine, and helping its armed forces: from Lithuania and the UK jointly training Ukrainian troops, to wider intelligence sharing and providing support for more complex command and control functions.

The UK’s enhanced forward presence in Estonia, and contributions to air policing as part of NATO’s strategy for the Eastern Flank, represent critical pieces of the Baltic security puzzle. In time, this on-the-ground presence will evolve from forward presence to forward defense — a strategy outlined at last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius and that will be developed at the Washington meeting in July.

Last, but not least — the British and the Balts also collaborate on defense innovation. With the UK a continental tech hub and soft power influencer, and the Baltics rapidly emerging as the next “Silicon Valley” of Europe, the two regions are deepening investment relations as well. A great example of this cooperation is Britain and Estonia jointly managing NATO’s new tech accelerator — DIANA.

Coincidentally, sensing and surveillance for subsurface coastal zones, served as one of the three inaugural challenges launched by DIANA last year, further underlining British-Baltic cooperation focused on building hybrid tools — for example, NATO needs technology to help identify where and when undersea infrastructure is being cut or interfered with.

There are plenty of lessons on rapid innovation to exchange as well. Britain’s infrastructure solutions, including spaces like the UK Defence BattleLab, could be expanded to the Baltics for closer innovator-user interaction.

In turn, Baltic entrepreneurs could exchange new know-how on rapid defense product prototyping, thanks to direct feedback from the Ukrainian military, with its frontline experience. The sharing of intellectual property also accelerates defense tech in Ukraine and beyond.

This summer of conferences should not be downplayed (after all, the G7 agreed to a $50bn loan for Ukraine funded by frozen Russian assets.) But it should also be remembered that in our increasingly contested European continent, closer ties between defense tech providers and national militaries are absolutely key to facing the Russian menace. The British-Baltic cooperation model offers plenty of strategic and tactical lessons.

Dalia Bankauskaitė is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis with CEPA’s Democratic Resilience Program, Professor at the Vilnius University, and an Expert at the Swedish Defence University. An interdisciplinary expert in security policy, strategic communication, and political advisory, she focuses on advancing the understanding of total defense and strat comms campaigns for high-visibility issues.

Leon Cook is the founder of Atticus Partners, a London-based strategic communications consultancy. He has more than 20 years of experience as an international government relations and corporate communications specialist working in major political capitals. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Public Affairs Board in the UK and is a Board Member of Conservatives Abroad. He is also the Conservative Party candidate in this year’s UK General Election for the constituency of Dulwich and West Norwood.

Dominykas Milašius is a geopolitical risk expert and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Unit 370, a boutique consultancy, specializing in strategic and geopolitical risk advisory. He has previously counseled top-tier decision-makers across the EMEA region, facilitating the development of strategic international programs. He is also a co-founder of Delta Biosciences, an interdisciplinary deep-tech startup, and a Venture Partner for Baltic Sandbox Ventures, a deep-tech VC fund.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.