NATO Needs Boots on the Ground in Ukraine

Leaked communications between high-ranking German Luftwaffe officials in early 2024 led to former British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, confirming in February that Britain had deployed a “small number of personnel” to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine against Russia. The further disclosure of a classified document in March 2023, which listed the deployed contingents of the UK (50), Latvia (17), France (15), the U.S. (14), and the Netherlands (1), suggests that NATO is already infiltrating its ground troops into Ukraine. There have been ex-NATO soldiers fighting as volunteers on behalf of Ukraine since March 2022, primarily motivated by the moral obligation of defending the very basic dignity of Ukraine’s independence. 

NATO troops on the ground could defend non-combatant sanctuaries, such as the Western Ukrainian cities of Lviv, Lutsk, and Vinnytsia, and police the Ukrainian borders with Belarus and Transnistria, freeing up tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops. It would further allow the acceleration of doctrinal reform in the Ukrainian army as well as the rapid collection and sharing of battlefield intelligence, as advanced by a recent RUSI analysis. Most importantly, as Russia begins to falter politically due to economic sanctions and stagflation, domestic agitation against war conscription, and military insurrection against the Kremlin’s battlefield incompetence, a physical NATO presence is a stern warning against any spasmodic response by the Kremlin at the beginning of a regime collapse, which could involve a desperate use of weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine or the Baltic.  

The current situation on the Ukrainian frontlines is bleak for Kyiv, with Russia continuing its slow advance on Pokrovsk, which is Ukraine’s last major source of domestic coking coal. Russia’s recruiting pool outnumbers Ukraine’s, driven by foreign volunteers, including the arrival of 10,000 North Korean troops, and facilitated by an 80 percent reductions in Russia’s internal garrisons, as reported by both Norway and Finland. Ukraine’s system of conscription is under great strain, and suffering predictable drops in morale and heightened incidents of desertion. Despite successes near Kursk, a sectoral collapse in Ukraine’s front is conceivable as output in Russia’s military industry have not yet reached its apex.

A gradually increasing NATO presence would demonstrate Western strategic and political solidarity with Ukraine, and blunt Moscow’s ambitions. Troops on the ground would call-out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s endless nuclear bluffs and would demonstrate the credibility of NATO’s willingness to fight rather than settle for peace at any cost. It would shorten the war by convincing the Kremlin that further escalation, with chemical or nuclear weapons, would incur incalculable retaliation. This would accelerate the current strategy of enabling the Ukrainians to attrit Russia’s armored stockpile, aircraft, and army manpower, and thereby force Moscow to negotiate on unfavorable terms. The risks and costs of a continued war in Ukraine in conjunction with a conflict over Taiwan, in the Straits of Hormuz, or in the Korean Peninsula, are severe.

This strategy of incremental intervention must be distinguished from mission creep, which is the inadvertent manifestation of slowly increasing military commitments, and like a salami tactics, intends to avoid retaliation by a graduated deployment below the threshold of the enemy’s response. A typical sequence is the positioning of intelligence personnel and special forces, logistics personnel, local and then long-range air defense, small, mechanized companies, local no fly-zones, and then combat battalions that approach the Dnepr River but remain beyond Russian artillery range. For example, German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall’s intention of setting-up four armament factories in Ukraine may require protection against land and air attacks. These missions may also begin as humanitarian operations, reactor security,  to stop mass incendiaries, or bio-diversity protection.

In some circumstances, political leaders may find it useful to advance these forces into harm’s way to justify an expansion of the rules of engagement, which was a NATO tactic in its intervention in the Bosnian Civil War. More nefariously, it would facilitate the entanglement of the otherwise indifferent civil societies of Western countries, increasing financial and military contributions to Ukraine. A case of this is U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt deployment of U.S. escort ships in the harm’s way of German submarines along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard in 1941. Obviously peer-to-peer intervention between nuclear-armed states risks a disproportionately costly war, but the presence of offsetting strategic arsenals may actually cause a situation of perfect stability that makes escalation less risky. Nevertheless, the U.S. declined to allow the CIA to intervene as part of its rhetorical roll-back policy, even covertly, on behalf of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet occupation. This was in part because of the high likelihood of escalation to nuclear war, the concurrent distraction of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the persisting vulnerability of West Berlin to Soviet blockade, and the lack of a convenient NATO frontier with Hungary. Analogues of the first three of these strategic dilemmas are present to some degree in the war over Ukraine.   

U.S. pilots serving in France in the First World (Escadrille Lafayette), The Flying Tigers fighting Japan in China, and in Great Britain during the Second World War, prior to official U.S. belligerence, were less exposed to political risk because they largely operated as combat air patrols, and so were shot down over friendly territory. In similarly defensive deployments, Soviet pilots started flights in March 1951 in the Korean War, and about 1,000 Communist Chinese military engineer troops were killed by U.S. bombing, out of the 320,000 rotated through the North during the Vietnam War. The French Foreign Legion has a long history of covert operations on behalf of their intelligence services, but not in peer conflicts. This author’s trade course bunkmate, sapper Ditomasso, who re-mustered as a FFL, was killed while covertly leading a Croat section attack on a Serbian position during the Bosnian Civil War.      

Growing U.S. involvement in protecting South Vietnam was reactive but deliberate, and hence not the result of mission creep, and therefore instructive. Large scale military deployment began in 1963 with 342 U.S. personnel from the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), primarily responsible for training the ARVN, but also intelligence collection on NLF/VC sanctuaries. The root cause of the U.S. failure in the Vietnam War was the political disjuncture between the Saigon and Washington governments, an issue that had been overcome during the Korean War by the near-total subordination of South Korea’s political, economic and military programs to U.N. Command. The CATO Institute is correct when it identifies Washington’s half-measures and lack of coordination in the Ukraine War, as worrying ingredients for failure. 

All of the French (COS), British (UKSF), and American (SOF), and even NATO, have experienced unconventional warfare units, command structures, and associated elite light infantry formations suited to a tailored preliminary infiltration of Ukraine. Given the possible shift away from foreign engagements in 2025 by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, French and British involvement may become more salient. France is most likely to rely on its 13ème régiment de dragons parachutiste under the control of the Commandement des actions speciales terre, given the unit’s extensive experience and joint operations with the U.S. in campaigns such as Operation Inherent Resolve. The British could be expected to deploy special forces teams supplemented by reconnaissance patrols drawn from the Royal Marines. Given the implicit escalatory link between U.S. special operations forces and strategic nuclear weapons, Washington may wish to reserve intervention as an instrument of signaling in the event of a drastic Russian battlefield escalation, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction. A U.S. intervention would most likely come in the form of a deployment of the 10th Special Forces Group, which under SOCEUR, is responsible for the Europe region. It may be supplemented with personnel from the 3rd Special Forces Group, who have experience operating opposite Russia’s Wagner paramilitaries. The upper scale of a U.S. intervention could come in the form of a brigade of 101^st Air Assault Division. This is also an opportunity for NATO countries like Canada, which otherwise refuse to increase defense spending, to show their commitment to a common strategy, by deploying their special forces into Ukraine.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.

Maximilien Hachiya is a War Studies scholar at King’s College London.

Ulysse Oliveira Baptista is a Political Science student at Concordia University Montréal. He is an associate researcher at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies.