Solitary horses in twilit fields and drunks teetering out of 24-hour truck stops gazed back at Rowe, 38, who was leading a Stryker column down a two-lane highway through the so-called Suwalki Gap. In the Pentagon's nightmare scenario, Russia seizes this 40-mile-wide bottleneck in a surprise attack, effectively cutting off the tiny Baltic republics — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — from their NATO allies. Rowe's mission was to show that the American cavalry was still capable of galloping to the rescue.
The US 2nd Cavalry Regiment's passage through the sleepy Suwalki Gap earlier this month was the anticlimactic highlight of a 1,500-mile road march that would take the regiment's Fourth Squadron from their base in southern Germany to the northern tip of Estonia.
"There's another horse," Rowe's voice crackled over the Stryker's intercom as his column approached the border with Lithuania. Thanks to passport-free travel within the European Union, motorists zipped past the boarded-up customs houses without even braking.
Achieving comparable freedom of movement for military vehicles among NATO countries has become the US Army's top priority in Europe after Russia caught the world off guard by massing tens of thousands of soldiers on Ukraine's borders and then occupying and annexing Crimea two years ago. The underlying fear is that an emboldened Kremlin may stir up trouble in the Baltics — not just to retake territory that once was part of the Soviet Union, but to prove NATO a paper tiger should the 28-member alliance fail to defend its weakest members.
