TRAINING: Turkish training exercises boosts relations

Units from the Turkish Air Force and Navy, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Qatar Emiri Air Force and the NATO E-3A AWACS participated in the two week exercise which ended earlier this month.

Four Qatar Emiri Air Force Rafales from the Al Adiyat Squadron at Tamim participated in this year’s Anatolian Eagle, alongside pairs of Azerbaijan Air Force MiG-29s and Su-25s, five Pakistan Air Force JF-17 Thunder aircraft, a single NATO E-3A AWACS and some 40 Turkish air force F-16s and sundry combat support types.
The Turkish armed forces have run training programmes for some 30 nations, and have expanded capacity-building training for allied nations in recent years, using this as a means of projecting soft power.

From the 1990s until the mid-2000s Israeli air force aircraft were regularly deployed to Konya to undergo similar training, until the relationship between the two countries started to unravel.

The E-3A Component deployed one detachment of 42 personnel from the Operations, Logistics and Support Wings to support the tactical planning and execution of all Anatolian Eagle missions. On a daily basis, the E-3A provided battle management and tactical command and control to as much as 30 aircraft executing the different tactical scenario's presented to the participants by a dedicated white cell.

During these missions, the participants faced different threats provided by a Turkish aggressor squadron and several Ground Based Air Defence systems.

 
NATO's E3-A was at the heart of the Eagle exercise