It all depends on the action of the others.
“There are whole weeks without an interception scramble and then there are weeks when we scramble a lot of times. Scrambling to intercept non-squawking Russians is part of the routine, says Lieutenant Colonel João “Sedi” Rosa, who commanded the Portuguese air force’s detachment of F-16s. Polish F-16s deployed to Šiauliai in 2017 (above) are there again now, on Poland’s eighth Baltics rotation. Even with transponders off, such flights are perfectly legal, and the Russians fully expect NATO to investigate unidentified radar blips, just as they intercept aircraft near their own shores (which, not infrequently, are NATO intelligence-gathering flights). The BAP pilots earn the bulk of their pay intercepting Russian military airplanes, which routinely fly between the motherland and Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian enclave wedged between southern Lithuania and northern Poland. So-called “non-squawkers” can be a menace unless escorted, like a car on the highway at night without lights on, so QRA pilots are launched to verify that they’re staying away. The QRA fighters are armed, but their mission is to chase, identify, and escort airplanes that aren’t communicating with air traffic controllers. Everyone I talked with-the Spanish air force officers, their Portuguese air force counterparts standing QRA at the other end of Šiauliai’s runway, the Lithuanian air force personnel who run and secure the base, the NATO spokesman in Germany-agree on one major point: BAP is about keeping the peace, not preparing for war. The deployments may be signals to Russia, but nobody wants to inflame tensions. To the north, the French air force was at Ämari with four Mirage 2000-5Fs. When I visited Šiauliai, the base hosted two detachments, six Spanish Tranche 2 Typhoons and four Portuguese air force F-16AMs. In 2014, concerned over Russia’s activities in Ukraine, NATO added deployments to Ämari in Estonia and to Romania’s Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport. The Baltic Air Policing arrangement is unusual but not unprecedented: NATO also rotates fighters to Iceland (which doesn’t have a military), and the airspace of Albania, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Luxembourg are all secured by larger neighbors. To the north, formally neutral nations Sweden and Finland guard their own airspace. South and west of Šiauliai, Danish and Polish F-16s protect their respective countries, integrated into NATO’s command structure. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea has made NATO jittery about the three small Baltic allies.Ī number of other air forces fly QRA missions in the area. The Soviet Union annexed all three Baltic nations during World War II and released them only when it broke apart in 1991. Looming large to the east of the Baltic states is Russia, with its large and capable military.
NATO sends fighter detachments to Šiauliai because Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia-which all joined NATO in 2004-are too small to afford their own advanced fighters for QRA. The Spanish fighters were in Lithuania last summer on a rotating NATO detachment near the small city of Šiauliai (show-lee), on a four-month deployment in the alliance’s Baltic Air Policing (BAP) program. Not far from where we were standing in Lithuania, fighters were certainly standing QRA for the Russian Federation. Canada, which shares the North American Air Defense (NORAD) mission with the United States, adds at least two more. airports in places like Homestead, Florida Chicopee, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon. Fighters in the continental United States stand ready at 14 U.S. Peacetime QRA is low-glamor police work to a fighter pilot, but virtually every nation with sufficient resources keeps fighters on alert, from the United Kingdom’s brand-new Typhoons to Cuba’s ancient MiGs. (Ministry of Defence / Crown, copyright 2014) A bogey might be an airliner, a spyplane, or as the British Typhoon discovered in 2014, an armed Sukhoi. Pilots rarely know why they’re scrambled. The Spanish Eurofighters that afternoon were on a training mission, a “T-scramble.” A real-world interception is called an “alpha-scramble.” By any name, QRA means armed fighters and crews standing ready 24/7 to launch within minutes to intercept unidentified aircraft approaching sovereign airspace without a flight plan or a squawking radar identification transponder. Department of Defense prefers Airspace Control Alert (ACA), but informally almost everyone calls it a “scramble.” In NATO military parlance, it’s a Quick Reaction Alert, or QRA.
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