US general outlines plan for preemptive strike on Russia's Kaliningrad region

The US military and NATO allies are embarking on a new “Eastern Deterrence Flank” plan aimed at enhancing ground capabilities and promoting military -industrial interoperability across the alliance.

NATO has a detailed plan to defend against Russia, General Christopher Donahue, commander of US Army Europe and Africa, said at the Association of the US Army's inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

US Commander in Europe and Africa, General Christopher Donahue. Photo: Task&Purpose

As part of a plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable global deterrence, the US Army and NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers, and cloud-based coordination, according to General Christopher Donahue.

Regional plans have been in the works for some time, but the US, along with NATO, first focused on the Baltic states “to try to figure out how to actually let industry and the countries know exactly what the requirements were – ultimately, this is now called the Eastern Deterrence Line”.

“We know what we have to develop, and the use case we are working on is ground-based [denial],” he said. “Land space is not less important, it is becoming more important. You can now destroy A2AD [anti-access, area denial] bubbles from the ground. You can now dominate the sea from the ground. All of that is happening in Ukraine.”

The Kaliningrad exclave is surrounded by NATO Baltic states. Photo: Britanica

Russia's Kaliningrad region, which is about 47 square miles and surrounded on all sides by NATO, now has the ability, General Donahue noted, to "take that area off the face of the earth in an unprecedented amount of time and faster than we've ever been able to do it."

“We have planned and executed. The mass and kinetic problem that Russia poses to us… we have developed the capability to ensure that we can deter that mass and kinetic problem,” Donahue said.

The plan includes a data-sharing system, which NATO has already purchased, Donahue said, referring to the selection of Palantir’s Maven Intelligence System, an artificial intelligence platform that can collect large amounts of data and analyze it quickly to help military commanders make decisions.

“We knew exactly what we needed to do with the cloud, and we knew exactly what kind of actual unmanned systems, the brigades, everything else we needed for that,” said Gen. Donahue.

Specifically, the US wants these capabilities to be interoperable with NATO partners. The US military also wants a common launcher that can serve both offensive and defensive functions, along with a fire control system that any country can use.

“We want everything to be able to be controlled at will,” whether it’s air defense or long-range firepower. “We want this to be a single, manned system where we can take munitions from any country and shoot them through,” Donahue added.