Gen. Donahue on Deterring Russia in Europe
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I spoke with General Christopher T. Donahue, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe-Africa and the Commander of Allied Land Command. We spoke about how the U.S. Army and its NATO partners are better preparing to deliver upon security in Europe and how the Army Transformation Initiative is already unfolding to prepare the Army for the future. Enjoy the show.

So why did you join the Army? Well, the first thing is, this goes to the way back machine. Probably most people don't know this, but we used to deliver newspapers. And when I was a young kid, right, like 10 years old, maybe 11 years old, I can't remember. But when we invaded Grenada, when I woke up to deliver the papers the next day, I went outside, picked up my papers I had to deliver, and on the front page, it

was Point Salinas, and it said, U.S. Army Rangers have jumped into Grenada. Now, of course, I immediately went inside and woke my dad up at like, you know, 4.30 in the morning and said, Dad, I think we're at war. And he was like, I think we're okay. I don't think we're at war. But I saw that and I was like, man, who are these Army Rangers? Pretty amazing. And

Long story short, you know, go off to West Point and I said, I had one goal in the army to be a Ranger company commander. And I was a Lieutenant platoon leader and a company commander in the Ranger regiment. So I self-fulfilled what I wanted to get accomplished with.

Way back then. What year did you graduate West Point? 1992. And who were some of your peers in that class that we might know about? Oh, incredible classmates. Sean Bernabe, my DCG, Trevor Brennenkamp, Michelle Schmidt.

Her and I were operations officer and intelligence officer in the same unit. Omar Jones, the MCOM commander. Phil Ryan, a great, great special operations aviator. Jim Eisenhower, who was going to do great things in the Army and continue to go and do things. I mean, there's multiple, multiple more. Joe Berger. I mean, you name it. We have an incredible class. What are some of your strongest memories from Ranger school? Yeah, I'm a hillbilly from Western Pennsylvania. I mean, to be honest with you, it wasn't that hard. Yeah.

It was fun. Like anything in the Army, it has its moments, but overall, I enjoyed Ranger School. Of course, the further I get away from it, the more enjoyable it gets. Yes, like all hard things, I guess. Who was your best boss in the Army who was not a general officer? Man, I had a lot of them that weren't general officers. Jeff Martindale in the Rangers, absolutely one of the best officers.

leaders ever. What made him stand out? Incredibly competent, a great person, funny. He had the best sense of humor, very dry sense of humor, but he could be super intense and you always learned from him. Just an incredible guy. Also in the Rangers, a guy named Jim Johnson. If you look across Colin Tooley, John Rafferty, all of us came from that guy and Martindale too. So those are two great guys.

Another organization that I can't really talk about, but a guy named Joe Cole, an amazing guy. And then when I was in Panama, we used to have forces in Panama. I was a company commander down there before the Rangers. I had a guy named Gerald Petorek, who was a grenade raider. I mean, all of those guys were so competent and just good people. They're all different, but just incredibly great people. Something that sets the Army apart from the other services really is that it isn't abnormal for subcontractors

some of the most senior leaders in the ranks to have gone back and forth between some of our most elite special operations units, including tier one units, and then the sort of general force, big army. You're one of those people. There's others that we could name.

Why do you think that's an important part or is that an important part of what the Army is and where do you think that comes from? Oh, yeah. It's incredible. I mean, I tell people all the time, I am where I am today because of the NCOs, okay, and the Rangers that I learned from and the officers. I mean, if you look at the group of officers that I was with, I mentioned two of them from 3rd Ranger Battalion.

Brian Menace, Eric Carrillo, Mark O'Neill, General Kearney, a couple other really, really just great officers that were in there at that time. I mean, they were unbelievable. You learn so much and you've such a distinct advantage just because of being around all those folks, but in particular the NCOs. The other thing I would ask is say, hey, not only who were the officers that were not general officers, but how many great NCOs did you work for or with? And

And it is incredible, the NCOs that I have been with in my military career, just unbelievable people. Matt Eversman, guy named Lindsey Bunch from the Rangers. I can tick everybody off across the way. A lot of guys wouldn't appreciate me saying their names, so I won't say their names, but they know who they are. And then the SMA, Mike Weimer was my Sergeant Major when I was the NATO slash US soft commander in Afghanistan. Just an incredible guy.

When you were selected for your current job, what was the first thing that popped into your head? I wanted just how incredibly grateful and how the importance of what the job is. I know General Cavoli very well, the guy that backfilled General Williams, I know really well. And because of what we did out there, we knew the environment from that aspect.

I was the one star in charge of Operation Atlantic Resolve. So, you know, again, I knew the environment, but what I really knew is we had to go out and the specific task was to reestablish ground deterrence in Europe. And that's what we're doing. In fact, that's what we were doing today. We spoke to the chairman. We spoke to, obviously, spent a lot of time with the chief staff of the army. And really, if you look at this initiative, it's going to transform how the United States Army fights and how the joint force fights, not only in Europe, but in the United States.

but across the globe. If you're looking what's going on right now, kind of version 1.0 of what you're seeing in Ukraine, what we're developing is 4.0. And again, this will establish ground deterrence in Europe with our NATO allies. But more importantly, the United States Army is a global force that has to go anywhere. So what we're establishing will be able to go anywhere. Indo-Pakom, First Island Chain,

CENTCOM, anywhere. And it's really amazing. We have great leadership right now pushing this. Army Transformation Initiative, which you're referring to, it really specifically calls out China. But as you just referred to, as the United States and the Army in particular have major obligations in Europe. Talk to me more about how you see this transformation of the Army reappearance.

realizing itself in Europe and what you think the Army should be able to do in, say, five years that it might not be able to fully do right now, or what kind of technologies you see it fielding and how you see them using it? I guess the first thing is, is what's not changing? We can't forget this either, right? You still have to do the basics really well. And I don't care, whatever the basics are for your job, you have to do it. You have to be incredibly physically fit.

Artillery is still really important. Brigades are still really important. Anyone who knows me, Donahue, he's the tech guy. He's the unmanned guy. You need maneuver brigades to hold land, to hold terrain.

That's not going to change during our lifetime. So what has changed though, is that these new forms of mass clearly can do heck of a lot. And we're seeing that across the world. I don't need to talk to this group that listens to this podcast. They know that intuitively. So what we are doing then is, is we're taking what our forces can or cannot do. We're analyzing that. And then most importantly, we're building the network, next generation C2. As you hear the chief and the secretary talk about it, that's the network to do it. And

And then we're putting the right people in place because this is all about passing data and connecting all these new forms of mass, drones, air, ground, water, EW, all this other stuff that we're saying. Some of it's old, some of it's new, but all this is going to develop us a capability where we can outmass our adversaries. That's the ultimate goal here, right? And you should never make contact with any adversary with a manned asset.

until, you know, you're really deep into a fight. So all of that. So how do you do all that? In Europe specifically, we know that to get back to ground deterrence, you have to knock down three A2AD bubbles. You have to stop a mass and momentum problem as General Cavoli calls it. That's 22 divisions approximately worth of capability that can stack up on that border underneath that A2AD bubble. And then you have to retain an offensive capability to hold your adversary at risk. That's ground deterrence.

And why does that matter? Because if you don't have ground deterrence, they can do stuff and then hold ground with the threat of nuclear weapons. So all these things are coming to play. That's what we have to develop. Now that same capability, if you were to go and put that into the CENTCOM AOR today, General Carrillo and Pat Frank, the Army Component Commander, they would love to have this ability. It has to be cheaper than your current munitions, and you have to be able to mass. Okay, and I don't want to get into it too much because it's...

obvious to your listeners, but also we are touching into some classified stuff here. You've touched on a lot of really important stuff there. What should we expect as we're modernizing our forces? In Europe, there's a similar conversation. Europe is stepping up on more spending and more modernization.

How are we going to make sure they're going to be able to keep pace with sort of our concepts of modernization, our concepts of operation? So the first thing is I'm kind of, I have multiple hats, right? Obviously, I'm Army Africa for the AFRICOM commander. I'm Army Europe for the UCOM commander. And then I'm also the NATO land component commander. And then I'm also in charge of certain portions of the regional plans, as they're called.

So in other words, I'm the guy that has to fight that. So all of these things have come together and really in the unity of command, unity of effort. But probably more importantly, as the LANCOM commander, I'm responsible to make sure that all of the NATO assigned units are ready to go to war. To include going back to NATO and saying, this is what these nations have to develop. So I have nine corps commanders that work for me on the NATO side.

All those things you have to put together from a U.S. side and a NATO side, and General Cavoli and General Walters, his predecessor, have done a great job with this, so that now you have unity of command, unity of effort, and not only in readiness, but also capabilities. You can see where Army Transformation Initiative and then all the NATO initiatives are.

are really aligned under one headquarters. That's the first time that's ever happened. So it's really powerful. And then whenever we look at this defense industrial base that we have to develop, and you heard Secretary Driscoll's testimony that it's going to be difficult to catch China's magazine depth, now you've 32 nations. Okay, those 32 nations are

economy is much greater than China's. If you actually get into true interoperability and we all were developing the same things to develop again this eastern flank deterrence line, this capability can go anywhere in the world. It's not just unique to Europe. It can go to CENTCOM, it can go to INDOPACOM because we're a fight with these allies everywhere. A lot of this depends on the timing of when we think the fight's going to happen.

I'm more confident the more time I think we have. I was just in Latvia, for example, and got unclassified briefings on plans and manning and situations there, let's say. And let's just say I wasn't confident we had enough people or enough technology if the fight were to happen in the next year, year and a half. Hopefully it won't. How much time do you think we need to realize this vision, especially when it comes to industrial mobilization, which I realize is something that you touch and you touch the plans too, but you don't have control over?

So the first thing is, is all these concepts and everything we are planning, but more importantly, we are training and exercising all to this effort to get to this ground deterrence, right? It's actually moving faster than what we thought it would, which is great. Now, to your point, how do you get the magazine depth required? You know, you're going to have the summit, which is going on right now. Everyone's going to come out with an agreement of 3.5 and 1.5, but ultimately 5%. Except Spain, but yeah.

All that will get sorted out. My point to all that is that you now, with this plan that I described, is that everybody knows the exact requirements of what they have to develop. That's the first thing. Then the Conference of European Armies in July, all the land force commanders and the vast majority of CHODS, they'll all show up and we'll go over this plan and say, this is what you have to develop.

And then we go right into land euro. And that's where all the vendors will be. Ukraine will come out, talk about their lessons learned, how to scale up their defense industrial base. So all those things will be occurring to move forward with what we know we have to do. If Ukraine is able to successfully come out of this war in one piece, it will sort of be a drone superpower in and of itself. How have you and your team been learning deliberately from the war in Ukraine?

I think there's obviously been so much you can do, but we're also limited by the fact that we don't have battlefield observers on the ground. We sort of have very limited ways we can learn directly in the country. So how have you been managing that problem? I think the best way to describe it is no nation on earth has learned more and has faster developed capability of how to do it and what to do than the United States. I

Again, if what you're seeing is 1.0 and we're developing 4.0, you can probably see that we're not just looking at Ukraine. We're looking at Russia. We're looking at everyone else and seeing what they're doing and building.

We're very quickly learning it, but we've had exponential growth on things. I mean, again, I'm not going to get into it, but I would just tell you probably not good for our adversaries what we're learning right now. What do you think are some of the limits of the cases? Because especially our Air Force friends talk about how differently we would fight, but also the Army would fight differently too than the Ukrainians are fighting. And some of their adaptations, like most adaptations on the battlefield-

are the result of deficits or not having enough artillery, for example. What do you think are the limits of the case for how they apply to what the US Army would do? The first thing is you're absolutely right. You never fight the last war. You can only take certain portions of what we're learning and applying that. Clearly, neither side

can generate very much joint capability or other capability was kind of leave it at that. So we would have a pretty distinct advantage. Now, depending on where you go, our adversaries will have other distinct advantages that Ukraine doesn't have to face. So again, it's not apples and oranges. It's different. But I think probably going back to your point about what have we learned, the first thing is using these new forms of mass, they can now enable other joint capability.

So if you look at Kaliningrad, an A2AD bubble, and you look at these new forms of mass, and you surround it on all sides with NATO territory, you can see where suddenly you can do things completely different at a significantly cheaper cost and just creating an unbelievable amount of dilemmas for your adversary.

So that's a little bit of what we're talking about. You have to have the right network to do it, and you have to have the right people to do stuff with that network and data. And that's what we're doing right now. Again, our progress is pretty damn impressive. And by the way, I'm a person who usually doesn't, like I'll say like, well, we're kind of getting there, we're not, but I'm really impressed with our leadership and how they're allowing us to move out on this. But also our young soldiers, they're so savvy in this arena. Yeah.

that I wouldn't worry about our soldiers being able to adapt to these things. But then do not forget though, I'm sure you've read the book, This Kind of War. And in there, everyone talks about air power and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it takes, the chapter of the book is Roman legions. It takes our Roman legions to make sure that we compel people to do whatever we need them to do. Even the threat, right? Because this is about deterrence and that's what we're trying to establish. What are some messages that you're

Hoping that industry is hearing to be able to support and enable what the warfighter needs. The first thing is, is everything has to be interoperable. You have to share your API. API is the thing that allows various systems to connect and pass the right data, et cetera, back and forth to each other. Everything has to be cheaper. And we need industry to solve some problems and they know what we need help to solve and

And they're working with us. But again, if it's not cheaper, we can't scale it quickly and it's not interoperable, we're not interested. So another thing Ukrainians have been doing that has gotten some attention, but I think less attention in the press at least, is their missile production costs seem to be much lower than what we're able to do, which I've taken note of at least. And then I would just say is we're fast following. More importantly, industry is fast following.

So you mentioned physical fitness earlier, but so much of successful soldier performance is about mastering the basics and competence and tactical mastery. How are we seeing that unfold? What have you seen there? This is one area where I'm incredibly proud of and just based off of my special operations background and all those great NCOs and officers that I talked about.

We've really been able to ingrain this in. And back when I was in the 18th Airborne Corps, the Army tasked us to come up with a lethality study. And really what they were saying is, how do we master the basics, as the SMA says all the time? So what we did is we went out and we looked at all the various units we had.

And we said, okay, this is how we need to train them both in physical fitness and then their individual tasks of what they need to do. And then we said, okay, third infantry division is going to be our test bed for it. So we did all of the various things. So if you're an infantryman, this is how you train with PT. Here's the program. Here's how you get tested every week to make sure that you are being held accountable and you're progressing. And then we did it for armor battalions.

And then we went and we generated, you know, what everyone refers to as stress shoots. We did stress shoots for infantrymen, tank crew stress shoots. So you go out, you do physical events and everything else. It's like a traditional stress shoot. Then you get into your tank and you go and you actually shoot your tank as a team, field artillery. So the results of that is their marksmanship is through the roof day and night. We have the data to prove it and their physical fitness is through the roof.

And culturally, they're doing significantly better. And DUIs and all those other indicators of units not doing well, significantly down. Okay, and that's a credit to the 3rd Infantry Division.

chain of command. And then you'll sit there and say, well, okay, what else can you say that actually proves your point? I just gave you kind of the rough data. The army just did a big PT event for the 250th birthday. Everyone competed, SOF, National Guard, every unit. Third Infantry Division got first place in the PT event. Unbelievable what they did. They got first place in the field artillery event.

competition out of Fort Sill. So they mastered their trade with their howitzers. They mastered PT. And then what the first brigade that started this whole, and they're now out in Europe, they went out to NTC. And for the first time in over 20 years, they did the complete combined arms live fire 100% at night. And their lethality score was the highest that it's been in 20 years. So you can see where all this is coming together.

So out in Europe, everybody who comes out, we test you when you get there. Everybody has to be a T, trained at whatever their company task is for their company troop or battery, and they have to live fire at night to a T standard. And then we train them across multiple CTC rotations. But we test them in the beginning and we test them at the end. And everybody knows they have to get better by the time they leave Europe. So all that basic stuff that you can't get away with. And then...

On the drone side, everybody is getting trained in how to do it. We're doing some really neat stuff with training Ukrainians, but really they're training us, right? So the drone testing and training that we're doing out in Europe right now is off the charts. You just reminded me of something. Have you heard of this US National Drone Association? And I think the army's putting a team together. I know the Marine Corps has, but I think it's some pretty exciting stuff, especially because of what just happened with Israel's initial attack on Iran and also Ukraine's

surprise attack with drones on Russian air bases. There's a lot of attention on the offensive potential of drones and also the need to counter them defensively, but countering drones also has an offensive element to it. How are you envisioning this? How's the army thinking about this? So on the defensive side, I mean, everybody has a lot to work to do on drones. I'm not going to get too much into that, but we have some organizations that have done remarkable work with static defensive stuff. The

The real magic is, goes back to our earlier discussion, you have to have an offensive capability to hold your adversary at risk or take something away. Or just you have to go and seize terrain, whatever the task is. So we're very focused on developing the ability to take these unmanned systems, these new forms of mass, electronic warfare, counter UAS, one-way attack, all these other things. But how do you do that while you're on the offense? And 2CR is leading our effort and 5th Corps out in Europe.

Yeah.

And what those soldiers out there of 2CR are doing right now is remarkable. One of the things, and you alluded to this earlier in terms of studying what Russia's doing, but learning from our adversaries can be very important. And I think one of the cases that doesn't get as much attention as a lesson maybe that it should is what the Houthis have been able to accomplish in terms of denial in the Red Sea by using

pretty inexpensive systems to challenge the world's most powerful Navy and really challenge shipping through that region without talking about the effectiveness of our operations there. Do you think we have something to learn from these non-state groups that are able to use these asymmetric, inexpensive means as an area denial, sort of creating their own bubbles and how it might apply in our own contingencies? Across the board, right? This is the cost curve we're talking about. Everyone can now develop these munitions

at a significantly cheaper price. And we cannot get into a competition on this cost curve. It's not going to work out. You have to drive the cost down. The way I describe it to industry is whatever we shoot has to be cheaper than what's being shot at us. And we can do that because we can bring things to scale. We have better engineers across the board to do that. And that's what we're, when I talk about 4.0,

And I was just in with the chief of staff of the Army today, General Rainey from Army Futures Command, Dave Hodney from Army Futures Command. All those folks were talking about this and trying to develop that. And we're the test bed for a number of the things that you're talking about. But we have to do that. Again, that is the goal of industry. Whatever you shoot down should cost more than what you're using to shoot it down. The other thing too is just on this is education.

Anything that we're shooting should be significantly cheaper than what it costs to produce today. Because all these different nations and us, and we have a number of companies in the U.S. that are producing these cruise and ballistic missiles and just regular...

missiles at a much cheaper rate. So we have to harness this. What is a book that has meant a lot to you at some point in your career? Oh, there's a ton of books. And I think it depends where you're at in your career. The other thing too, is you should go back and reread books as you continue through life and you have different experiences. Very important that you do that. But most recently, probably one of the best

books that I've read is, it's actually three books. It's the Pacific Trilogy. And the reason that's so important is that it starts way before World War II starts. And it takes you through what I call the continuum of warfare. So everything that happens prior to a conflict, the reasons why it started, how you actually developed your plans, your capability or did not, and then

How do you actually start to adapt and integrate everything as you go through the conflict, bring it to scale, and then successfully win or lose in the case of Japan? And then what happens afterwards? Ian Toll is the author. And that is, for where I'm at in my stage of my life, that was a great book. Great three books to read.

And then, you know, there's throughout your time period, I think there's other books that you should read. And you shouldn't just all be military books either, right? You should go back and kind of read those things that are important to you. But, you know, the one for junior leaders, Band of Brothers. And, you know, I'm biased. I got to know Dick Winters very well, but just an amazing combat leader. And there's other great combat leaders in that book, but just tells you about who we are as an army. And that's an incredible book.

Anything else you can read about Lafayette or Causeway with the 82nd Airborne Division? An unbelievable fight that nobody knows about. Thanks so much for being on the show.

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