How NATO combines aircraft from 25 countries

Flying a 50,000 pound attack aircraft at 10,000 feet above the earth may not be the best time for a language lesson. But it was part of the drills Major Greg Kirk of the Idaho Air National Guard had to decipher last week as he sought clarification of his mission from a heavily accented German military air traffic controller who issued the orders.

English is the lingua franca for most military air forces, and the German Joint Terminal Attack Controller spoke fluently, but his accent was difficult to understand over the feedback from the headset in Major Kirk’s A-10 jet.

“I now know what he’s trying to say,” Major Kirk said in an interview at Lechfeld Air Base in southern Germany three days after the exercises. “Training together with all our NATO partners this week – things are moving now, things are happening much more efficiently.”

The joint air force exercise, which ends on Friday after 12 days, was the largest in NATO history, involving 250 aircraft and about 10,000 personnel from 25 countries. Held in various places in Germany, they are not technically led by NATO, and they were planned long before Russia invaded Ukraine on a large scale 16 months ago.

But the implications in light of the current conflict, the largest in Europe since World War II, couldn’t be clearer. “As we face the biggest security crisis in a generation,” said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu, “we are united to keep our countries and our people safe.”

But even the most terrifying fighters and other weapons depend on effective communication, a particular problem when they can come from one of the 30 alliance members. Officials have long expressed concerns about so-called interoperable capability to ensure disjointed systems or technology can be linked for smooth communication and coordination.

Flight instructions can vary, not only between different types of aircraft, but also depending on the country they come from.

Each of the 25 countries participating in these exercises also has different levels of encryption and secret systems on their jets, so “you can’t put the Greek pilots in an American F-16,” Lt. Col. Jennifer said. Ovanek of the Idaho Air National Guard.

Barriers have also emerged in the past between fighters flown through the same country, such as interoperability issues between the US F-35 and F-22, said Douglas Barrie, a military aerospace expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Even the NATO tactical network known as Link 16 — which synchronizes military operations communications between aircraft, surface ships, ground vehicles, missile defense systems, networked weapons, and command and control networks — is sometimes hampered by the scope of the encryption required.

“It’s not perfect — none of these things ever are,” Mr. Barrie said. “All of these things get flushed out in exercises like this.”

Last Monday, the first day of exercises at Wunstorf Air Base in northern Germany, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz already predicted problems with Link 16. However, he was not too worried.

“It probably barely worked today; tomorrow, partially; the next day it will be all right,” General Gerhartz, chief of the German air force, said in an interview. “It’s so hard. They have different crypto nets, it’s incredibly complex. If you simulate it, it always works. You have to do it in life to see, ‘OK, that was the mistake, we made sure .’”

Sometimes the communication breakdown is even more fundamental, as Major Kirk discovered.

This is far from the Idaho unit’s first overseas stint; it was also based in Bagram, Afghanistan in 2020, and more recently has been involved in joint exercises with the Asia-Pacific Air Force. But sometimes the language barrier is a primary problem, and Major Kirk said he has had to ask air traffic controllers to spell out the names of targets or to speak more slowly.

That can be difficult in the stress of a quick exercise, not to mention a military operation. “Normally everyone wants to go fast,” he said. “But to go fast, you have to start slow.”

Given that US and European troops have spent much of their time over the past 20 years coordinating combat flights in Iraq and Afghanistan, Colonel Ovanek said many of the exercises this week in Germany felt remarkably familiar. “It’s the same job, it’s just a different location,” she said, pointing to “same targets, same kind of interoperability issues, same NATO forces.”

But advances in aircraft, technological upgrades, new swarms of air forces sweeping the skies and, as is the case with Russia, increasingly powerful adversaries have necessitated the constant testing of communication systems between the allies. The exercises will also measure how the Allies manage to shift ever-evolving battle plans while spread out over a large theater.

“Normally we have mass briefings, where everyone sits together, and right now we are in different places and trying to coordinate all of this,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jürgen Schönhöfer, who pilots a Eurofighter jet as commander of the 74th German tactical air force. Wing. “If there is a real mission, it will be similar.”

He too noticed the communication breakdowns in the first few days of the exercise. “This is normal with different countries, different capabilities, different speed of speech,” Colonel Schönhöfer said. “This is normal – this is NATO.”