Watch as a Russian Fighter Jet Intercepts U.S. Bombers Over Baltic Sea During NATO Exercise

June 19, 2017 Topic: Security Region: Europe Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: RussiaMilitaryTechnologyWorldU.S.NATOBaltics

Watch as a Russian Fighter Jet Intercepts U.S. Bombers Over Baltic Sea During NATO Exercise

Could things escalate? 

Even the simplest things—where to get fuel, where to throw out the trash—can be headaches at an unfamiliar base. Then there’s the language barrier with Polish counterparts.

Those minutiae of day-to-day operations are some of the biggest hurdles to sort out in peacetime exercises.

“No matter where we’re at, our job doesn’t change,” Mathews says. “Every time a jet goes up, there’s a life in that seat that we’re responsible for. I never forget that.”

Deploying to an unfamiliar airfield is a challenge for pilots, too.

Freeborn says that flying daily simulated combat operations out of a new base, with unfamiliar airspace and local procedures, takes pilots out of their comfort zones and better simulates the real world complications that come from rapidly deploying away from home station to respond to a crisis.

“They have to adapt their normal habit patterns to an unfamiliar setting,” Freeborn says.

Enduring Bonds

BALTOPS is a peacetime military exercise occurring above the actual location where a conflict could break out. It comprises frequent aerial run-ins with NATO’s most likely adversary, Russia.

It’s not an exercise held over a desolate desert range in Nevada, or a swath of empty terrain in Alaska. NATO forces are not simulating, in some distant place, the battlefield over which they could fight the next air war. They’re at it. And the enemy is watching their every move.

As a result, this exercise is more than a chance to rehearse combat operations. It’s also a dry run of the logistics operation necessary to move U.S. military assets to the Baltic region.

“Even the simple things are difficult,” Freeborn, the F-16 commander, says.

Another novelty of the exercise for the Air Force is the battlespace.

Air Force pilots typically spend less time training to operate in the maritime environment than their Navy counterparts. Yet, as part of NATO’s air policing responsibilities in the Baltics and the Arctic to counter the Russian threat, many Air Force missions occur over the water.

BALTOPS is a chance to hone skills supporting maritime operations, which only can be simulated at other Air Force training sites.

“In day-to-day training we don’t have access to that level of joint assets,” Freeborn says, adding:

At least for us in the 510th, that’s an absolutely unique experience for us to actually get to physically work with the naval component of our joint team.

Certainly working with the physical assets and not having to simulate something is great. Both with the Army, the Marines, the Navy … those are just usually fake voices on the radio.

Team Players

The U.S. trains to go to war with its allies.

“I’m conditioned to operate and think as a coalition,” Padilla, an F-16 pilot based in Poland with Detachment 1, says. “At a minimum, to be joint minded. And to be humble and gracious enough to know we are not the big bear in the room.”

Poland, a former Warsaw Pact member state, joined NATO in 1999. Today, the U.S. F-16 pilots hold their Polish counterparts in high regard for the rapid transition they’ve made from a post-Soviet military into a valuable NATO asset.

“It’s remarkable what they’ve done in such a short amount of time,” Padilla says. “They’re motivated.”

On the ramp here at Krzesiny Air Base, Soviet-era Russian fighter jets that the Polish Air Force operated as part of the Warsaw Pact are lined up beside a U.S.-made F-16 fighter—the Polish Air Force’s modern workhorse, which it began flying in 2006.

Every so often, on this day, U.S. and Polish F-16s roar overhead.

On the ramp beside the old Russian fighter jets, Padilla, a seasoned American fighter pilot for whom jet noise is a humdrum part of his workday routine, can’t help but look up.

“What’s the modern day Warsaw Pact?” Padilla says. “There is none. But NATO endures.”

This first appeared in The Daily Signal here.

Image Credit: Creative Commons.