anything, like just the way you talk on the
radio, like ‘Bingo fuel’ and so on.’
Norway soon noticed the advantages
of the CBT program, in terms of training
against dissimilar aircraft and integrating
with other non-NATO nations on a daily
basis. Furthermore, the remote areas in
the northern part of Sweden would give
the RNoAF access to facilities not seen in
Norway, as ‘Folder’ outlines: ‘If you look
at the map and look at the possibilities
with airspace — in particular northern
Sweden, where there [is lots of airspace]
for air-to-air training. That was clearly very
attractive.’
This led to Norway joining the CBT in
2009, taking advantage of the entire
training package. ‘If you look at it from
our perspective in Norway’, says ‘Folder’,
‘for both Bodø and Ørland, when we were
only oriented towards other NATO air
forces, we were limited if we wanted to
do something from our home bases, as
opposed to going to ‘Red Flag’ in the US,
of course, which was the type of solution
we had to go for.
‘Once the cross-border era started
to evolve, we could all of a sudden see
that we had excellent airspace, and the
advantages of training from our home
bases with — and against — mixed
formations.’The t raining order
What began more than 15 years ago as
small-scale, basic air-to-air engagement
training has grown into one of the moste ective daily training programs you
can nd anywhere in the world, utilizing
the massive airspace of the remote and
deserted northern parts of Finland,
Norway and Sweden.
Today, CBT is a large operation, in which
the squadrons at the three northern
bases put in a wish-list of what kind of
training they want. It can range from
a large force deployment to simple
basic training for the students on the
squadrons.
Once a year this wish-list is incorporated
into the operational plan for CBT. The
plan is to have 40 events a year. This is
revisited after six months to check if they
are sticking to the plan, as Maj Jouni
Turula from Fighter Squadron 11 of the
Finnish Air Force at Rovaniemi states: ‘We
make a CBT training order for the entire
year, and we schedule the sorties in that.
We want to make a lot of them, as they
are easy to cancel if something comes
up [that means] we cannot participate,
it’s harder to put new ones in it. The CBT
sorties are planned for almost every
week, and it gives us around one CBT
sortie every second month for each pilot.’CBT a dvantages
The major bene ts of the CBT program
are the low cost, the exibility,
the expansive airspace, and the
interoperability with other nations. The
aircraft y from their home bases, ght,
and return home. It’s the same as a
regular training sortie with the local units.One of the unique aspects of CBT is the
way communications, planning, brie ng
and debrie ng are done. The squadrons
have a video teleconference (VTC) system
set up, so that they can conduct brie ngs
and debrie ngs ‘face-to-face’, even though
they are not located at the same base.
Some days two nations can be found
‘ ghting’ each other. On others all three
join the ght. A typical trilateral force
could involve eight Swedish JAS 39
Gripens and two Norwegian F-16s
working together against six F/A-18s
from Finland. The nations share the
burden as ‘Red Air’, and they try to spend
every second sortie as the ‘enemy’, doing
as they please.
The mission is built around what the
‘good guys’ want. ‘Red Air’ plays the
role desired by the other units. They
thus experience as much variation as
possible and can optimize the training,
whether it’s o ensive counter-air,
defensive counter-air, large-scale
deployment scenarios or whatever the
squadron needs.
Turula describes well the advantageous
geographical location of the three air
bases: ‘The other ghter squadron that
has F/A-18s here in Finland is quite a lot
further south of Rovaniemi, so basically
the closest ghter squadron we have isA couple of years
ago we mostly
trained against a medium-
level threat, but now
we’re more focused on a
high-threat environment,
so we need to go in at low
altitude — we can’t go mid-
level any more.
Lt Col Peter ‘Restless’ GrebergAbove: An
impressive ‘wall’
of Gripens from
Luleå-Kallax down
low. High-threat
tactics have
driven non-
stealthy fi ghters
into the lower-
level environment
during particularly
demanding
mission phases.
Left: The Gripen
has a small,
effi cient support
footprint. This
example from F 21
is ready to taxi.96 April 2018 //^ http://www.combataircraft.net
EXERCISE REPORT // CROSS-BORDER TRAINING
94-99 Cross Border Training C.indd 96 16/02/2018 10:13