Did Adm. Rob Bauer, who heads NATO's Military Committee, say the group would launch pre-emptive strikes on Russia in the event of war? No, that's not true: In his remarks at a conference in Brussels, Bauer never mentioned the possibility of NATO attacking Russia pre-emptively. In fact, he stressed Russia would have to hit NATO targets first before the Alliance responded, saying "we are not going to attack Russia out of nothing."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on November 25, 2024, that opened, "Head of the NATO Military Committee: We must launch pre-emptive high-precision strikes against Russia." It showed a photo of Bauer with the quote
'We must now replenish our operational stocks of weapons that have been depleted. Also, we must invest more in air defense, as well as in systems for precision strikes. I am happy that a new discussion has been started in NATO and that the attitude towards the idea of we are a defensive alliance and that we will sit and wait for them to attack us, and then we will react. It would be wiser not to wait, but to target the launch systems in Russia in case Russia attacks us. A combination of high-precision strikes is necessary, which should disable the systems, which would be used against us, and we must attack first,' he said. is the head of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer.
Here's how the post looked on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Dec 3 05:56:13 2024 UTC)
The X post misquotes Bauer (archived here). He never proposed launching pre-emptive strikes on Russia in his talk at the European Policy Centre on November 25, 2024 (archived here). He emphasized that NATO would only respond if the Russians fired the first shot. At the 48:36 mark of the full one-hour, 15-minute session posted on YouTube, the moderator asks him:
Andrius Kubilius [European commissioner for defense and space] during his [European] Parliament hearing said that, you know, Russia can produce in six months what Germany has in its stocks. And NATO has come a long way in bolstering defense and deterrence posture ... Do we have the forces and the equipment and the capabilities and societal readiness in case there is an attack in Europe on NATO?
Bauer responded:
The answer is yes. We have the forces, we have the readiness. Our challenge at the moment is that we know there's a number of things that we need to buy more of ...
We need to invest more in air defense, for example, but also deep precision strike, which is a discussion that is relatively young in NATO, and I'm very happy that we had it and that we have now changed this attitude ... I mean, the idea was that we're a defensive alliance, so we will only sit and wait until we're attacked, and then when we're attacked we will be able to shoot down the arrows that come to us. But it's smarter not only to do that, but also to attack the archer that is in Russia -- if Russia attacks us. So you need to have a combination of deep-precision strike with which you can take out the weapons systems that are used to attack us. And of course, because we're a defensive alliance, we will have to take the first blow. So Russia will start the conflict, because we are not going to attack Russia out of nothing. So, yeah, we will need more air defense -- that's one of the lessons from Ukraine -- and at the same time we are going to invest in the deep precision strike.
The claim that Bauer proposed launching pre-emptive strikes on Russia appeared in several versions and languages on social media, for instance, here (archived here), here (archived here) and here (archived here). Many of these posts came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (archived here) misrepresented Bauer's words at a press conference on November 26, 2024. A report by Russia's official TASS news agency quoted Lavrov as saying (archived here):
Just the other day, Mr. Bauer, NATO Military Committee Chair, explicitly stated that it's no longer enough, and ensuring the defense of the North Atlantic Alliance member states requires strikes on targets in Russia that NATO believes may pose a threat to the bloc. I think there's nothing to comment on here; it's just that they have forgotten all etiquette, publicly announcing their real plans.
More Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to NATO can be found here.
