‘Better never stops’: Commanders preview NATO’s next large-scale, live-fly exercise
Military personnel from more than 15 nations in the NATO alliance are getting set to conduct a series of complex training missions that mirror realistic, contemporary combat scenarios and confront emerging adversarial threats, according to two senior officials overseeing the massive, upcoming Ramstein Flag 2025 exercise.
When it unfolds between March 31 and April 11, the event will span 12 allied operational air bases and incorporate more than 90 fighter jets and support aircraft from across NATO’s arsenal.
Unlike similar exercises that pre-dated it, Ramstein Flag 2025 will be run out of Royal Air Force Netherlands’ Leeuwarden Air Base. And this year, the militaries involved are primarily practicing activities associated with counter anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), integrated air and missile defense, and agile combat employment.
“Participants — operators, air crew, engineers — will all hone their skills in achieving success in those missions. And importantly, [they’ll be] learning a lot of lessons,” U.K. Air Marshal Johnny Stringer, deputy commander of NATO Allied Air Command, said Monday.
Stringer and Royal Netherlands Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. André Steur hosted a virtual media roundtable with a small group of reporters to preview the alliance’s vision and key objectives for the exercise.
“We sometimes underestimate that value of actually knowing the folks you’re going to possibly go to war with — and [to] train together with them to be able to fight as one team,” Steur said.
The partners involved aim to bolster the survivability of the alliance’s troops and equipment, and ultimately reduce their enemies’ ability to target and take them out.
Stringer declined to share certain details about the event for security reasons, but pointed to cross-servicing aircraft as one aspect they’ll be training on. NATO has been improving in this regard over the last three years, but it was more commonplace during the Cold War, he told reporters.
Cross-servicing encompasses “one nation’s engineers or maintainers doing the turnaround between missions of another nation’s aircraft type,” he explained.
The alliance has already succeeded with cross-servicing certain aircraft in real-world operations to date, but Stringer said in this exercise officials are taking it further and operating out of 12 different bases to “deliberately stress” themselves. He noted that Ramstein Flag 2025 takes its “provenance from” the famed Red Flag exercise series that’s run out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
“There’s a very good reason to do that, which is, if you get everybody at the same location, it makes briefing, debriefing, etc., a whole lot easier. But we won’t have that luxury for real in wartime, and we need to be able to practice it dispersed across multiple locations. So, that’s one of the things we’re getting at during Ramstein Flag. But we’re using a raft of other exercises. And this is another area where, to use a great phrase, ‘better never stops’ — and we’ll always be continuing and iterating what we do,” Stringer told reporters.
He said “high-end” exercises like this enable military leaders to dig into fundamental, tactical questions to prepare for future fights, like was “our side being shot down in numbers that are unacceptable?” The events also highlight existing challenges regarding technology and connectivity that could impact the alliance’s capacity to execute joint operations globally if members have to go to war.
“When we were trying to pass some critical data, whether it be at the planning stage or even during the execution stage, were we able to get it through? Did the sort of networks which we had configured — did they actually work? Did we put too much onto some people’s shoulders? Was that particular sort of two aircraft, four aircraft formation getting very task-saturated at the time, because what was being asked of them was so challenging?” Stringer said, referring to further questions Ramstein Flag 2025 will help answer.
“And I think this exercise is not just about interoperability and training towards a target set or a certain opponent, but it’s also providing exposure at all levels,” Steur added.
The first iteration of Ramstein Flag was held in October 2024. The two officials said the intent is to hit a regular cadence moving forward.
The commanders also briefly discussed how NATO is integrating lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war — particularly with regard to technology adoption and adaptation — into their training.
“I think there’s also an old lesson to be learned, if we look at Ukraine, that when none of the parties are able to establish air superiority, then warfighting becomes extremely difficult. And I think if our deterrent in the alliance would fail, a lot of folks are going to be looking at the allied air forces to set the preconditions for conflict and make sure we can facilitate freedom of maneuver on the surface and be able to defend our forces on the ground as well. And I think that is exactly what we are training towards with Ramstein Flag and our flag exercises,” Steur said.
This event will notably occur at a time when the new Trump administration is reportedly exploring a major shift in how the U.S. participates in NATO. American President Donald Trump has also repeatedly bashed other alliance members for not meeting the goal of spending at least 2% of their GDP on defense.
“All relationships, all alliances probably have their ups and downs. But what you’re seeing in Ramstein Flag is some of the highest-end training we’re able to conduct in Europe across a raft of nations, supported by all 32 nations in the alliance, to generate the essential skills that we’ll need — all of us will need — to keep Europe safe. And that ability to integrate, to be interoperable across nations, is essential to it. And that is underpinning the exercise,” Stringer told reporters.
