PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo.—Four Russian military officers calmly munched sandwiches and sipped soda and coffee Wednesday inside a U.S.-based military post established to defend against their country.
Their presence at the headquarters of NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian military command created 55 years ago, would have sparked national security concerns during the Cold War era.
But today, they and other Russian, Canadian and U.S. officers along with civilians on two continents are participating in a joint training exercise between the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the Russian Federation to test their ability to cooperatively defuse an international hijacking.
“Right now we have a common enemy, and that’s terrorism,” said Russian Air Force Maj. Gen. Sergey Dronov through an interpreter.
The third annual exercise was evidence of the continuing thaw—at least at the military level—in the once-tense relationship between Moscow and Washington, and U.S. allies in the West such as Canada.
The three-day drill, which ended Wednesday, was the third such joint exercise between NORAD and the Russian Federation.
The first two involved having a small airplane cross the Pacific in the role of a hijacked civilian airliner, escorted by NORAD and Russian fighter jets in succession.
This year’s exercise was entirely a simulation. Teams at NORAD’s headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., and at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and at two sites in Russia communicated by phone and Internet video.
On Wednesday, the scenario had a hijacked airliner leaving Alaska westbound across the Pacific and being intercepted by Russian fighter pilots, who persuaded the hijackers to return to Alaska.
Five Russian officers, three interpreters and a dozen or so U.S. and Canadian officers and interpreters sat around a conference table monitoring computer screens inside NORAD headquarters.
Around them rose a steady hum of Russian, English, and French-accented English from some of the Canadian officers. At the head of the table, Russian Air Force Maj. Gen. Sergey Dronov conferred and sometimes shared a smile with Joe Bonnet, a civilian who heads training at NORAD and its sister agency, the U.S. Northern Command.
“What we are doing here is developing procedures between NORAD and the Russian Federation that just weren’t established before,” said Capt. Martin Jutras of the Canadian Air Force, one of the exercise participants.
Dronov and U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Richard Scobee of NORAD said the two sides had no problems integrating.
“As far as cultural barriers, those other issues, there’s none,” Dronov said.
Scobee said the two sides’ tactics and procedures were similar.
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