NATO can defend Baltics claims commander

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NATO has huge resources and can effectively defend the Baltic region, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (Deputy SACEUR), currently in Riga for a training event for NATO senior leadership, told the press on August 19.

Commenting on the media reports that NATO military vehicles might have problems with traversing the difficult terrain in the Baltics, Briton Bradshaw said: "All of these issues affect an aggressor as well as a defender. A defender seeks to make an advantage out of these things. I would say that anything that inhibits armored access is a positive advantage”.  

NATO is confident that it can effectively defend the Baltic region, he said.

"The resources available to NATO are huge. They are proportionate to the size of the Alliance and the task that we face in collective defense. In formulating defense plans one is not always relying on symmetry. This is not always matching one force with an exactly mirroring force. On the contrary, it is quite often creating asymmetry in order to deliver an advantage,” Bradshaw said.

Commenting on the increased activity of the Russian armed forces, Bradshaw noted that Russia was investing huge amounts of money in its armed forces.

"We hear every month of some new proposed acquisition by the Russian forces. One has to question what it’s all for. Because NATO is quite obviously a defensive alliance. You only have to see the mechanisms involved in NATO decision-making to understand it could not possibly be an aggressive alliance. It’s unthreatening. We hold armed forces in proportion to the task of collective defense and no more. We question why neighbors of NATO should seek to do any different,” he said.

The Latvian Defense Academy in Riga is hosting exercises Steadfast Pyramid and Steadfast Pinnacle 2015 for 48 senior officers from NATO member states, Finland and Sweden on September 13-25.

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