The US intelligence community is beginning to wake up to the possibility of Vladimir Putin having Russia engage in a limited incursion into NATO territory in an attempt to relieve Western pressure on him regarding his invasion of Ukraine. (That invasion, keep in mind, he was explicitly permitted to carry out by ex-President Joe Biden, so long as Putin kept it to a small one.)

The likelihood of the most extreme scenario—a limited land incursion—is low, but gets higher as time goes on, according to the reports.

It’s a threat that needs to be taken seriously and to be prepared for.

Putin’s military doesn’t need to be up to snuff to embark on a limited invasion of NATO territory. His military just has to be better than the forces he’d face, and depleted as his military is, they are, strongly so. Likely he couldn’t run all the way to Dunkirk, but he could run all the way to the Baltic Sea. Nobody in Europe, individually or in the aggregate as an alliance presently has the wherewithal to defeat a Russian invasion.

The authors suggested a grey area type of invasion/incursion, and doing so, they missed the larger picture.

The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country….

Do the authors mean like the cyberattacks Putin has been running all along against the Baltic States for some years?

They posed this bit of ignorance as if it were a serious deterrent:

Such a move [armed invasion] has always been considered extremely unlikely because it would trigger NATO’s Article 5, which commits members to collective defense.

This is a chimera, at best. There’s nothing in Article 5 that requires an armed response by NATO members. The nations’ Foreign Ministers shaking their fingers very firmly at Putin, or Prime Ministers and Presidents issuing strongly worded statements objecting to the invasion, would satisfy the Article.