| Summary: | For many years the Northern Region has been considered of secondary importance to NATO theater military operations. But with the buildup of Soviet forces on the Kola Peninsula and within the Northern Fleet, Soviet regional TVD operations now have the potential to seriously threaten NATO's Atlantic SLOCs and even outflank allied forces in the Central Region itself. NATO continues to respond by partitioning the Northern Region among the three major NATO commanders, SACEUR, SACLANT, and CINCHAN, instead of unifying it into a viable theater of operations. AFNORTH, the principal Northern Region warfighting command, may no longer be adequately structured or have the forces, operational depth, and agility to conduct a cohesive combined campaign that synchronizes all air, land, and sea operations in a theater where maritime influences have emerged as a dominant feature of the operational environment. At the same time NATO's emphasis on the Central Region has limited serious investigation of the Maritime Strategy as a potential theater warfighting concept in the European context. The monograph examines the fundamental concepts of the Maritime Strategy to see if they have application in improving combined theater campaign plans in the Northern Region. The monograph is structured as a case study focusing on campaign planning from CINCNORTH's perspective, looking at the Northern Region as a theater of operations and analyzing CINCNORTH's role in it. The criteria used for evaluation are the "seven tenets of a campaign plan" introduced by COL William Mendel and LTC Floyd Banks in recent articles in Parameters. The monograph concludes that in the present operational environment (geography, threat, coalition aspects, etc.) AFNORTH, as presently structured, is not capable of conducting viable theater campaign planning. Further, the author feels that the distinct maritime nature of the area warrants consideration of the Maritime Strategy as a theater strategy. A model is offered to show how planning in this maritime theater ...
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