Former NATO Military Committee Chair Admiral Rob Bauer: “War With Russia Is Now More Likely Than No War”

“I think the chance of a war with Russia has become bigger than no chance of a war with Russia. Unfortunately,” Bauer said in a recent Decoding Geopolitics podcast interview, published on September 12.

Bauer, who served as NATO’s most senior military officer during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, argued that the threat has changed substantially from earlier assessments that Russia would need several years after the end of the war in Ukraine to regenerate forces for a possible conflict with NATO.

“For a long time, the intelligence community was saying, so after the war, it will take three to five years before Russia will be ready again to fight NATO,” Bauer said.

That assessment, he added, has now shifted.

“Now they say, within three years, during the war, Russia is able.”

Bauer stressed that capability does not automatically mean intent. But he argued that Russia’s expanding war economy, continued force generation and the Kremlin’s difficulties in Ukraine are together creating a more dangerous environment for NATO.

Bauer argued that Russia’s war economy is now producing enough materiel to sustain the war in Ukraine while also rebuilding military capacity elsewhere.

“The Russian war economy is actually working very hard and successful, and is producing more weapons and ammunition, and drones and everything, than they need in the war in Ukraine,” he said.