In 2024, reflecting a popular Western belief, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “NATO is the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Yet just two years earlier in 2022, after a 15-year campaign, NATO was defeated by the Taliban, a rag-tag group of poorly armed insurgents.

How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?

Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.

Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?

The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.