A giant exercise under Luftwaffe leadership saw a mass deployment of fighters from the US to Germany to train with their European partners, as Dr Stefan Petersen reports
Air Defender 23 was hailed a superlative exercise – and the result was neatly summed up by the Air Chief of the German Luftwaffe, Lt Gen Ingo Gerhartz, who said: “We can do it!”
A strong signal was sent by NATO that it is fully capable of defending its territory – and that it can deploy the necessary forces from the United States to Europe.
More than 100 aircraft, about 3,000 personnel and 1,500 tons of materiel from 42 US states was transferred over the Atlantic by the US Air National Guard (ANG) within a few days making it the largest deployment of air forces that NATO has undertaken in recent history.
“The last time we flew so many aircraft to Europe was during World War Two,” Lt Gen Michael A Loh, the ANG Director, stated. Gerhartz had convinced Loh of the idea for this exercise, led by the German Air Force, in 2018. And while his claim was not strictly true, it made a good soundbite!
After five years of planning, the first jets took off on June 12 from 26 airfields for the first multinational missions on Schleswig-Jagel and Hohn in the north, and Lechfeld …
