odanny
Diamond Member
A clear message, but also a much needed exercise to coordinate various air elements across NATO, especially those former Warsaw Pact countries.
The largest military air exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War began on Monday as more than 25 nations took to the air in fighter jets, bombers and cargo planes in a pointed demonstration to Russia.
The war games have been planned since 2018, but took on added urgency after the invasion of Ukraine, which alarmed NATO members that lie in the shadow of Russia and jolted the military alliance into reinventing itself after years of torpor.
All but two of the participating nations are NATO members, including Finland, the newest, and the drills are hosted by Germany. Sweden, which is seeking NATO admission, is also taking part, and Japan is an observer.
“Air power is the first response in a crisis,” Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, chief of the German Air Force, said in an interview at the close of Monday’s exercises — the first of 12 days unfolding at six bases across the country. “We can really react fast, as first responders.”
The exercises, called Air Defender 2023, well before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, but their roots do lie in Russian aggression: the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. General Gerhartz, who organized the war games, described that as a “wake-up call.”
After 30 years of shrinking military budgets, air power had become a vulnerability for NATO, but that began changing after the Russian invasion, with leaders in Kyiv billing their country as Europe’s first line of defense against Moscow. The United States eventually agreed to let Ukrainian pilots train on American-made F-16 fighter jets as part of a broader campaign among some NATO states to supply Ukraine with warplanes — not just for the current conflict, but to deter Russia for years to come.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO has shifted from what the military calls deterrence by retaliation — relying on the promise to come to the defense of any member and push back any occupying force — to deterrence by denial, which seeks to prevent an occupation in the first place. That means more troops and equipment based permanently on the Russian border, more integration of allied war plans and more military spending.
Where it might take weeks for warships to sail from the United States, or days to mobilize ground troops in Europe, fighter jets can be scrambled within minutes.
Monday’s flights included a pit stop at an air base in Lithuania, a former Soviet Republic where fear of Russia looms large, specifically to show how quickly warplanes taking off from Germany would arrive. Similar stops will be made in other countries that were once under Moscow’s thumb — Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.
In preparation for the war games, the United States sent more than 110 planes and thousands of service members, mostly from National Guard units, over the last two weeks.
“It’s pretty much unprecedented, the amount of aircraft and people that we’ve moved over here in such a short period of time,” said Maj. Will Dyke, a pilot with Kentucky’s Air National Guard.
Wunstorf Air Base, where the air show took place on Monday, hosts one Germany’s largest military transport units. Cargo and refueling planes — two aircraft workhorses — make up the bulk of its fleet. Fighter jets, the show horses of the sky, are stationed at other bases.
“If you think about a real war, this could be a place where German transport planes would start,” said Maj. Peter Poehlmann, a German officer who oversaw the construction of a new refueling station for jets that could burn though as much as one million liters of fuel each day during the exercises.
Over the course of a week, NATO warplanes had been scrambled 15 times to intercept Russian jets that had strayed close to Baltics states’ airspace, in what Lithuania’s Defense Ministry on Monday said was likely Moscow’s response to the exercises in Germany.
Then this past weekend, German forces tracking a plane from Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, quickly handed off command to NATO officials, who deployed fighter jets. Hours later, a commercial airliner over Germany lost radio contact with air traffic controllers, putting General Gerhartz’s forces back in control of what was deemed a domestic alert.
www.nytimes.com
The largest military air exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War began on Monday as more than 25 nations took to the air in fighter jets, bombers and cargo planes in a pointed demonstration to Russia.
The war games have been planned since 2018, but took on added urgency after the invasion of Ukraine, which alarmed NATO members that lie in the shadow of Russia and jolted the military alliance into reinventing itself after years of torpor.
All but two of the participating nations are NATO members, including Finland, the newest, and the drills are hosted by Germany. Sweden, which is seeking NATO admission, is also taking part, and Japan is an observer.
“Air power is the first response in a crisis,” Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, chief of the German Air Force, said in an interview at the close of Monday’s exercises — the first of 12 days unfolding at six bases across the country. “We can really react fast, as first responders.”
The exercises, called Air Defender 2023, well before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, but their roots do lie in Russian aggression: the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. General Gerhartz, who organized the war games, described that as a “wake-up call.”
After 30 years of shrinking military budgets, air power had become a vulnerability for NATO, but that began changing after the Russian invasion, with leaders in Kyiv billing their country as Europe’s first line of defense against Moscow. The United States eventually agreed to let Ukrainian pilots train on American-made F-16 fighter jets as part of a broader campaign among some NATO states to supply Ukraine with warplanes — not just for the current conflict, but to deter Russia for years to come.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO has shifted from what the military calls deterrence by retaliation — relying on the promise to come to the defense of any member and push back any occupying force — to deterrence by denial, which seeks to prevent an occupation in the first place. That means more troops and equipment based permanently on the Russian border, more integration of allied war plans and more military spending.
Where it might take weeks for warships to sail from the United States, or days to mobilize ground troops in Europe, fighter jets can be scrambled within minutes.
Monday’s flights included a pit stop at an air base in Lithuania, a former Soviet Republic where fear of Russia looms large, specifically to show how quickly warplanes taking off from Germany would arrive. Similar stops will be made in other countries that were once under Moscow’s thumb — Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.
In preparation for the war games, the United States sent more than 110 planes and thousands of service members, mostly from National Guard units, over the last two weeks.
“It’s pretty much unprecedented, the amount of aircraft and people that we’ve moved over here in such a short period of time,” said Maj. Will Dyke, a pilot with Kentucky’s Air National Guard.
Wunstorf Air Base, where the air show took place on Monday, hosts one Germany’s largest military transport units. Cargo and refueling planes — two aircraft workhorses — make up the bulk of its fleet. Fighter jets, the show horses of the sky, are stationed at other bases.
“If you think about a real war, this could be a place where German transport planes would start,” said Maj. Peter Poehlmann, a German officer who oversaw the construction of a new refueling station for jets that could burn though as much as one million liters of fuel each day during the exercises.
Over the course of a week, NATO warplanes had been scrambled 15 times to intercept Russian jets that had strayed close to Baltics states’ airspace, in what Lithuania’s Defense Ministry on Monday said was likely Moscow’s response to the exercises in Germany.
Then this past weekend, German forces tracking a plane from Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, quickly handed off command to NATO officials, who deployed fighter jets. Hours later, a commercial airliner over Germany lost radio contact with air traffic controllers, putting General Gerhartz’s forces back in control of what was deemed a domestic alert.
NATO Members Use a Major Air Exercise to Send a Message to Russia
More than 200 planes from 25 countries gathered in Germany for the largest-scale war games in decades, held with an eye on the war in Ukraine.
