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Inspector of the German Air Force Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz speaks to the members of the media, on the sidelines of a press conference, about the Air Defender 23, the largest multinational deployment exercise of air forces in the history of NATO, in Berlin, Germany, on June 7, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
An air deployment exercise billed as the biggest in NATO’s history, and hosted by Germany, gets under way on June 12.
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The long-planned Air Defender 23 exercise, which is set to continue till June 23, is expected to showcase the alliance’s capabilities amid high tensions with Russia.
Some 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations will respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member.
The United States alone is sending 2,000 U.S. Air National Guard personnel and about 100 aircraft.
“The exercise is a signal — a signal, above all to us, the NATO countries, but also to our population, that we are in a position to react very quickly — that we would be able to defend the alliance in case of attack,” German Air Force Chief Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz told ZDF television.
Mr. Gerhartz said he proposed the exercise in 2018, reasoning that Russia’s annexation of Crimea underlined the need to shore up NATO’s defences.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, has jolted NATO into preparing in earnest for the possibility of an attack on its territory. Sweden, which is hoping to join the alliance, and Japan are also taking part in the exercise.
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Assessments of the extent to which the exercise will disrupt civilian flights have varied widely. Matthias Maas, the head of a German air traffic controllers’ union, GdF, has said that it “will of course have massive effects on the operation of civilian aviation”.
However, Mr. Gerhartz said Germany’s air traffic control authority had worked with the air force to keep disruption “as small as possible”. He noted that the exercise was limited to three areas which wouldn’t all be used at the same time, and that it would be over before school vacations started in any German state.
“I hope that there we will be no cancellations; there may be delays in the order of minutes here and there,” he said, insisting that a study cited by the air traffic controllers’ union assumes a worst-case scenario in bad weather in which the military wouldn’t fly anyway.
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