The air force exercise was under the German flag and was therefore not an official NATO exercise. According to Cobelens, the exercise was not even planned to impress the Russians, because war in Ukraine was not yet in sight when the exercise was planned.
The Netherlands has participated in Air Defenders with four F-16s and four Joint Strike Fighters, and the air force could still learn a lot from that, according to Cobelens. “The transition from the F-16 to the Joint Strike Fighter is a challenge for the Air Force, because they are different types of aircraft.”
Deterrence
“It has become a successful exercise where you have learned a lot, because you have to generate power with 25 countries, with different types of aircraft and mixed personnel,” says Cobelens. The main goal, he said, was to maintain NATO’s credible deterrence, “so that no one is tempted.”
According to Cobelens, the fact that the war in Ukraine is often labeled as trench warfare is due to the fact that almost no aerial weapons are used by the Russian side. While on NATO’s side, air superiority is, according to him, ‘an absolute condition’. ‘If you have it, then those trenches become much less believable and a war like that doesn’t have to be as bloody as we see in Ukraine. If you don’t have air superiority in the theater where you have to fight, you lose the war. This is also one of the reasons Mr. Zelensky keeps asking for those F-16s.”