the NATO member states. The essence of Putin’s gamble failed. NATO had gone to its highest alert status twelve hours earlier. The Pentagon elevated its level of readiness from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 2. The last time U.S. forces had been placed on a DEFCON 2 status was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it was up to Admiral Krone to turn back the Russians’ advance.
Admiral Krone deployed NATO armor and mechanized units back from the border, taking advantage of lakes and marshes that the invading force must circumnavigate. He meant to force Russian ground forces into killing zones, where combined tank and close air support could destroy them. Other tactical aircraft would contest Russian fighters at higher altitudes.
The struggle to control airspace above the battlefield was critical to the outcome below. NATO and the Russian air forces were roughly equal in numbers, although the West enjoyed a technological edge in fighter capability. And here, the admiral cursed. He’d told the president that he needed more naval support, but the conflict had exploded before any ships could arrive—even if a carrier could be dispatched from the Persian Gulf to the Baltic Sea. And he’d told his flag aide, a young SEAL lieutenant, “This is what happens when budgets make strategy. U.S. security policy gets tunnel vision and forgets Europe.”
The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was currently on station in the Persian Gulf. Her seventy F-35C fighter-bombers would have given NATO’s air forces an advantage, clearing the skies of Russian aircraft and then striking Russian columns to stop them from moving deeper into Estonia. Any aircraft carrier in the U.S. inventory would have done so. The USS Carl Vinson was currently in intermediate maintenance in Norfolk. She would be pulled out and ordered to the Baltic, but it would be at least seven weeks before she could go into action. There were no other carriers that could arrive sooner. The United States had one other deployed carrier, halfway around the world—in the West Pacific.
The consequence, as Krone had earlier warned the Joint Chiefs, was that the ground campaign would be longer and bloodier. It was. Instead of confronting the Russians with ground forces on the Narva River’s east bank, Krone attacked them as they crossed, smote them as they maneuvered to avoid lakes and marshes, and arrayed his forces west of the river, where the enemy was stopped with U.S. allied units to their west and the river behind them. Estonia’s superbly trained special operations forces nipped at the heels of the invaders and demoralized them.
Krone’s plans accomplished their objective. They crumpled the Russian offensive and brought it to a halt. Putin could not turn back politically. Tactically, the Narva complicated his generals’ escape route back into Russia.
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