Flying a 50,000 pound attack jet 10,000 feet above the ground may not be the best time for a language lesson. But it was part of the drills that Maj. Greg Kirk of the Idaho Air National Guard had to decipher last week as he sought clarity about his mission from a heavily accented German military air traffic controller issuing the orders.
For most military air forces, English is the lingua franca and the German Joint Terminal Attack Controller was fluent but difficult to understand due to his accent from headset feedback in Major Kirk’s A-10 jet.
“I know what he’s going to say now,” Major Kirk said in an interview at Lechfeld Air Force Base in southern Germany three days after the exercises began. “Joint training with all our NATO partners throughout the week – things are moving now, things are going much more efficiently.”
The joint air force exercises, which end on Friday after 12 days, were the largest in NATO history with 250 aircraft and around 10,000 employees from 25 nations. Conducted at multiple locations in Germany, they are not technically NATO-led and were planned well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago.
But the ramifications of the current conflict, the largest in Europe since World War II, couldn’t be more obvious. “As we face the greatest security crisis in a generation,” said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu, “we stand united for the security of our countries and our people.”
But even the most fearsome fighter jets and other weapons rely on effective communications, which poses a particular problem when one of the 31 alliance members can provide them. Officials have long raised concerns about so-called interoperability, to ensure separate systems or technologies can be linked together for smooth communication and coordination.
Flight instructions can vary not only between different aircraft types, but also depending on the country they are coming from.
Each of the 25 countries participating in these exercises also have different levels of encryption and secret systems on their jets, so “you can’t put the Greek pilots in an American F-16,” said Lt. Col. Jennifer Ovanek of the Idaho Air National Guard.
Barriers have also emerged between fighter jets from the same country in the past, such as interoperability issues between the American 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 communications about military operations between aircraft, surface ships, ground vehicles, missile defense systems, networked weapons, and command and control networks — is sometimes hampered by the amount of encryption required.
“It’s not perfect – none of these things are ever perfect,” Mr Barrie said. “All of those things kind of get flushed out with exercises like this.”
Last Monday, the first day of exercises at Wunstorf Air Force Base in northern Germany, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz already predicted problems with Link 16. However, he was not overly concerned.
“It probably didn’t work very well today; tomorrow, partially; The next day it’s all right again,” said General Gerhartz, head of the German Air Force, in an interview. “It’s so difficult. They have different crypto networks, it’s incredibly complex. If you simulate it, it will always work. You have to do it in life to see, ‘Okay, that was the mistake, we took care of it .'”
Sometimes the communication disorder is even more fundamental, as Major Kirk found.
This is far from the Idaho unit’s first overseas deployment; It was also based in Bagram, Afghanistan in 2020 and more recently has been involved in joint exercises with air forces in the Asia-Pacific region. But sometimes the language barrier is a major issue, and Major Kirk said he’s had to ask air traffic controllers to spell the names of targets or speak more slowly.
That can be difficult in the stress of a hectic exercise, let alone a military operation. “Usually everyone wants to go fast,” he said. “But to be fast, you have to start slow.”
Given that US and European forces have spent much of the past 20 years coordinating combat flights in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of this week’s drills in Germany felt strikingly familiar, Colonel Ovanek said. “It’s the same mission, it’s just a different location,” she said, citing “the same goals, the same interoperability issues, the same NATO forces.”
But advances in aircraft, technological improvements, new blackness in rotating air forces and, as in the case of Russia, increasingly bolder adversaries have necessitated constant scrutiny of communications systems between allies. The drills will also measure how allies manage to modify ever-evolving battle plans while spread across a major theater of war.
“We usually have mass meetings where everyone sits together and right now we’re in different places trying to coordinate it all,” said Lt. Col. Juergen Schoenhöfer, who flies a Eurofighter jet as commander of Germany’s 74th Tactical Air Force wing. “If there’s going to be a real mission, it’s going to be similar.”
He also noticed the communication problems in the first days of the exercise. “That’s normal for different nations, different skills, different speaking speeds,” said Colonel Schönhöfer. “That’s normal – that’s NATO.”
