The Wee and Deadly Hedgehog; A Nation of Riflemen

If you are a small and distinct ethnic group that happens to have its own nation in 2016, you only got there by having a certain personality and rich understanding of your own history. For that and many and many other reasons, I have always liked the Estonians.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, they more than any other Baltic republic seemed to have a realist view of their Russian neighbors, and their own very real ties to the West.

The Estonians fought with us relatively caveat free in Afghanistan, and always invested in their defense stronger than their neighbors as a percentage of GDP. As Russia has grown in strength and belligerence, Estonia is showing the only proper response.

Taking a idea the Swiss have mastered - though without the geographic gift the Swiss have - the Estonians are doing all they can to make themselves a tough target, one that really would not look like it would be worth the trouble it would take to subdue.

Already, she and her three teammates had put out a fire, ridden a horse, identified medicinal herbs from the forest and played hide-and-seek with gun-wielding “enemies” in the woods at night.

By comparison, this would be easy. She knelt in the crinkling, frost-covered grass of a forest clearing and grabbed at the rifle parts in a flurry of clicks and snaps, soon handing the assembled weapon to a referee.

“We just have to stay alive,” Ms. Barnabas said of the main idea behind the Jarva District Patrol Competition, a 24-hour test of the skills useful for partisans, or insurgents, to fight an occupying army, and an improbably popular form of what is called “military sport” in Estonia.
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The competitions, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but are not intended as fun. The Estonian Defense League, which organizes the events, requires its 25,400 volunteers to turn out occasionally for weekend training sessions that have taken on a serious hue since Russia’s incursions in Ukraine two years ago raised fears of a similar thrust by Moscow into the Baltic States.

Estonia, a NATO member with a population of 1.3 million people and a standing army of about 6,000, would not stand a chance in a conventional war with Russia. But two armies fighting on an open field is not Estonia’s plan, and was not even before Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said European members of NATO should not count on American support unless they pay more alliance costs.

Since the Ukraine war, Estonia has stepped up training for members of the Estonian Defense League, teaching them how to become insurgents, right down to the making of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, the weapons that plagued the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another response to tensions with Russia is the expansion of a program encouraging Estonians to keep firearms in their homes.

Her neighbors should look at what Estonia is doing. It is a tough neighborhood; be a tough target.