COLOGNE, Germany--Germany and the Netherlands will in October test joint operations of their Patriot air and missile defence systems in what could be a model for multilateral deployments to Poland or the Baltic states in coming years, a top German general said.
Brigadier General Michael Gschossmann said joint operations enabled by the new approach could help NATO reassure Baltic member states and Poland, which are clamouring for more defences after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region.
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia say they fear Russian aggression should Moscow's relations with the U.S.-led Atlantic alliance deteriorate further. The Baltic states are linked to the rest of NATO only by a narrow strip of land running between Belarus, a staunch ally of Russia, and Kaliningrad, the heavily militarised Russian coastal enclave.
The October test will validate a new joint concept of operations for air and missile defence developed by Germany and the Netherlands over the past year, the first of its kind in Europe, Gschossmann, commander of ground-based units for Germany's Air Force, told Reuters in an interview.
More than 40 interceptors will be fired during an exercise at a NATO site in Crete in early October that will include 300 German and 100 Dutch soldiers, as well as 10 U.S. soldiers and a U.S. Aegis destroyer, according to German and U.S. officials. After the test, German and Dutch military officials plan to declare their Bi-national Air & Missile Defence Task Force ready for combat, and will offer it to NATO for future deployments.
Baltic state officials welcomed U.S. deployment of a Patriot battery to eastern Europe during a series of exercises earlier this summer, but the symbolic value would be greater if the deployment involved more than one country, Gschossmann said. "We could offer even more reassurance and send a political signal if we took a mixed task force with German, Dutch and U.S. Patriot systems - a purely defensive asset - and set it somewhere in Poland or the Baltic states."
Dutch, German and U.S. Patriot missile systems were rolled out separately in Turkey for two years from January 2013, where they helped protect fellow alliance member Ankara's air space against the possibility of missile attacks from war-torn Syria. The new German-Dutch concept of operations uses the Surface to Air Missile Operations Centre, which was initially developed by Airbus Group SE for the German Air Force.
