Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
had been training for six months made their final preparations. So did the infantry and helicopter gunship units that would assist in capturing airfields at towns west of the border with Russia.
Estonia is a small, low-lying country dotted with marshland and lakes. Unlike central Germany, it lacks an abundance of broad plains suited to large-scale armored battles. Estonia has no easy invasion routes from Russia. The center of the dividing line between the two states runs down the middle of Lake Peipus. Through the long lake’s vertical axis passes about 120 kilometers of the 294-kilometer-long border. Lake Peipus empties into the Baltic Sea through the north-flowing Narva River.
Russian forces went into action at 0300 on July 2. They established bridgeheads along the Narva River and began rolling west to encircle Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city.
The invasion route was well trodden. Russia’s military under Peter the Great had used it twice at the beginning of the eighteenth century. More recently—in the first half of 1944—Soviet General Leonid Govorov, commanding the Leningrad Front, drove west with the immediate object of seizing Estonia from Nazi control. The three armies under his command invaded across the Narva River. This time, the field commander of Russian forces would be a veteran of the 2014 invasion of Crimea, General Alexander Lentsov.
President Algodón had spoken with the other NATO member chiefs of state. He persuaded them that, as Putin had not stopped in Ukraine or Moldova, he would not stop if he could swallow the Baltic States. He reminded them of what European defense would look like if American voters decided that the Europeans were unreliable allies and forced the United States to withdraw from NATO.
Article 5 was invoked. The Russian invasion of Estonia would be regarded as an attack on all 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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