What NATO must do to contain Russia.

• Author: Haber, Alex
• Position: EUROPEAN DEFENSE

From encroachment in Ukraine to offensives in Syria, the Russian bear is awake and in motion. Though claims of an impending second Cold War may be overstated, Russia has gone so far as to call NATO's recent overtures a threat to the country's national security while at the same time refusing the Western alliance's efforts to set up a military-to-military dialogue.

Rumblings from the East coupled with troubling wargame results (spoiler: NATO loses badly to Russia) have presidential hopefuls, Congress and Western military brass rightfully concerned about where Putin aims to pounce next. With tensions mounting on the European front, NATO needs to develop a new resource strategy that does more to build trust among its members and achieve interconnectivity between its networks.

NATO must rapidly and publicly redress shortcomings on both of these fronts even among serious financial constraints. Though Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's proposal to quadruple the Pentagon's budget for European defense is a positive step, it is unreasonable to expect that many other NATO allies will meet this U.S. spending uptick with funding surges of their own.

Clear evidence to this point is the fact that only five of 28 NATO countries met their 2015 targets of 2 percent of GDP on defense spending.

When NATO thinks interoperability, members often turn to joint military exercises. In 2015 alone, NATO planned for approximately 270 exercises, notably with about half devoted to "reassuring Eastern European allies." One big-ticket activity to note is Trident Juncture 2015. As NATO's largest exercise in over a decade, it brought together more than 36,000 personnel from 30 countries.

Longstanding tools in NATO's arsenal, joint exercises are cost-effective ways to put faces to flags and to test capabilities in no-risk combat scenarios.

Andrew Hunter, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that for a bill "well south of a billion dollars, exercises drive quite a lot of value by helping soldiers gain familiarity with other countries' engagement strategies and by increasing the probability of allies coming to each other's support." Retired Army Gen. Raymond Odierno comments that recent exercises have helped allied forces identify and remedy interoperability challenges "that could have outsized impact in a fight against Russia." Along these lines, militaries get to test drive new technologies in...