Allied Air Forces Train Elite Instructors in Netherlands
The Royal Netherlands Air and Space Force hosted a Multinational Weapons Instructor Course at Leeuwarden Air Base from July 6-10, 2026, bringing together 24 students from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. Participants included fighter pilots, intelligence officers, air battle managers, tactical airlift crews, and ground-based air defence personnel. They flew intensive training missions involving up to 20 aircraft per wave, including Dutch and Danish F-35 fighters and Finnish F/A-18 aircraft, with commercial 'red air' adversary support. The course focuses on developing elite weapons instructors who return to their national units to train others and lead multinational air operations. Training emphasizes integrating fifth-generation fighters, intelligence, command and control, electronic warfare, and ground-based air defence. The program reflects NATO's increasing emphasis on interoperability and collective readiness. Following the Dutch phase, the course continues in Norway. Leeuwarden Air Base has hosted such training since the 1950s and runs the course every two years.
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Reports are grouped by semantic similarity and deterministic rules. Language models may assist titles, summaries, translation and cross-source analysis; the page itself is projected from evidence records.
- Current automated evidence projection