Nato’s largest air exercises send message to Russia

WUNSTORF AIR BASE, Germany - The largest military air exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War began on Monday, as more than 250 aircraft from across the United States and Germany – fighter jets, bombers and cargo planes – took to the air in a pointed demonstration to Russia of how Nato would respond if the alliance was attacked.

The war games had been planned since 2018 but took on added urgency after the invasion of Ukraine, which alarmed North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (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 25 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,” Lieutenant-General 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, had been planned since 2018, well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in late February 2022, but their roots do lie in Russian aggression: the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Lt-Gen Gerhartz, who organised 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, the capital of Ukraine, billing their country as Europe’s first line of defence 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 also 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 go to the defence 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 US or days to mobilise ground troops in Europe, fighter jets can be scrambled within minutes.

Monday’s flights included a pit stop at an airbase 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 the end, it’s all about credible deterrence,” Lt-Gen Gerhartz said. “We don’t want to be too aggressive, but to show that we are strong.”

In preparation for the war games, the US sent more than 110 planes and thousands of service members, mostly from National Guard units, over the past two weeks.

“It’s pretty much unprecedented, the number of aircraft and people that we’ve moved over here in such a short period of time,” said Major Will Dyke, a pilot with Kentucky’s Air National Guard.

He declined to describe how the drills might ever be deployed against Russia except to say: “The way we train is to be ready at a moment’s notice.”

Wunstorf Air Base, where the air show took place on Monday, hosts one of Germany’s largest military transport units.

Cargo and refuelling 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 Major Peter Poehlmann, a German officer who oversaw the construction of a new refuelling station for jets that could burn through as much as 1 million litres of fuel each day during the exercises.

Mr Douglas Barrie, a military aerospace expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said such exercises must test whether aircraft from so many nations can communicate directly with one another.

Lt-Gen Gerhartz agreed that this remains a big challenge, but recounted a real-life demonstration of coordination between Germany and Nato commanders that took place just days earlier.

Over the course of a week, Nato warplanes

had been scrambled 15 times to intercept Russian jets

that had strayed close to the Baltic states’ airspace, in what Lithuania’s Defence Ministry on Monday said was likely Russia’s response to the exercises in Germany.

The military exercises come at a turning point for Germany, which has for years fallen short of spending 2 per cent of its GDP on defence, the threshold Nato states are supposed to commit. In late 2022, the government in Berlin said it expected to meet the 2 per cent target by 2025.

But some allies of Ukraine remain sceptical, citing Germany’s lagging weapon deliveries to the country despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s sweeping talk of a new era after Russia’s invasion.

Mr Scholz has committed €100 billion (S$144.7 billion) to bolster Germany’s armed forces, which have been repeatedly warned about major deficiencies in the state and readiness of its equipment and weapon systems.

Mr Thomas Wiegold, a respected German military blogger, said that if the multinational training drills taking place now are successful, they will show that Germany is willing to take a leadership role in Nato.

Mr Stephan Weil, president of the Lower Saxony region of Germany, where the Wunstorf Air Base is located, called the exercise “necessary”. NYTIMES