The U.S. Army and its NATO allies are rapidly aligning resources to develop a new “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” aimed at developing combat capabilities that can measure up to possible Russian attacks, according to service commanders in Europe.
U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander Gen. Christopher Donahue “wants to go fast on this,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, the Army’s V Corps commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.
“How can you get the capabilities that are available now, get them into the hands of soldiers, to [get a] proof-of-concept and then scope and scale it so we can get what we need.”
The idea for a Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, or EFDL, which was first announced in July at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, is to focus on enhancing ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance, Donahue explained there.
As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination, according to Gen. Donahue.
That is taking shape in the form of amassing counter-drone systems in countries along the Eastern Flank, tying together air defense and defensive fires and sharing data that enables NATO to work together, according to Costanza.
The Army’s V Corps is currently participating in a NATO exercise — called Avenger Triad — that involves five different corps from across the alliance, including Poland. This, Costanza said, will bringing to EFDL closer to reality.
“To help us fight and actually realize the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line — we’ve got a new organization called an Operational Fires Command,” he said, “which will integrate all of our lethal and non-lethal capabilities into one organization to streamline that.”
Avenger Triad is incorporating specific capabilities like Spike Non-Line-of-Sight missiles fired from AH-64 Apache helicopters, which are relatively new assets for Poland.
Also part of the effort, the Army and NATO partners are incorporating Palantir’s Maven Smart System “to use the AI capability to streamline how we use data,” Costanza said.
One of the bigger elements unfolding as part of the EFDL is how the U.S. Army and NATO forces are fielding unmanned systems to take out enemy drones along the Eastern Flank.
The chosen system — the U.S.-based startup Project Eagle’s Merod — is already being proven successful in Ukraine.
“We’re training our Polish partners how to use them,” Costanza said. “Same thing with [our] Romanian partners. We’re now expanding it to Denmark with a view of expanding this capability up and down the Eastern Flank of Europe.”
These developments come at a time when the number of incursions over Eastern Europe airspace is surging.
Taking note, the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command is prioritizing contributions to the EFDL concept, and while cruise and ballistic missiles are still a concern, focus is on the sort of one-way attack drones proliferating on Ukraine’s battlefields, according to its commander Brig. Gen. Curtis King.
The counter-drone platform helps address the cost conundrum of using expensive missiles against cheap drones, King noted.
“We’re training on that to understand how to employ capabilities that allow us to, at a lower cost, build capacity that we would need to defeat the amount of one-way attack drones we’ve seen Russia be very successful at launching on a continual basis,” he added.
Another plus is that the Army’s drones can be produced much faster than a traditional missile. Rapidly fielding systems at scale is therefore more feasible, according to King.
“We’re moving as fast as we can,” he said. “We’ve been told to get this to move out as quickly as possible.”
King added that he expects to see each country feature a similar capability within this calendar year, “if not sooner than that.”
The Army is currently assessing drone-on-drone intercept platforms produced by several different companies, to include government organizations, he noted.
The command is also looking at “passive sensors and active sensors [to see how] we enhance sensor coverage to ensure that we have the right detection capability to facilitate detecting those threats and then defeating them,” King said.
Additionally, the command is working on the data integration of all of the sensors through cloud architecture.
This approach helps “to ensure that we can get the data — not just to the normal air defense participants that we would need, but to get this data over to the intelligence organizations and to the fires organizations,” King said, “so that they can [take] action on this data and improve that.”
Focusing on these particular capabilities don’t just address the deterrence line in Europe, but extend to enabling a global deterrent, King acknowledged.
“Those capabilities are many of the same capabilities that our leaders have told us to look to develop for the Golden Dome of America,” he said, “for homeland defense activity as well.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
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