5 NATO Bases Spending Billions To Prepare For The F-35's European Expansion

Europe’s Lockheed Martin F-35 expansion is becoming one of NATO’s biggest peacetime construction pushes, and the aircraft itself is often the smallest line item. New hangars, hardened aircraft shelters, security perimeters, weapons infrastructure, flight simulators, and rebuilt runways must all be in place before a single Lightning II can operate from a European base, and several of the continent’s air forces are rebuilding decades-old airfields from close to scratch to make that happen. Billions of euros, pounds, and dollars are now flowing into bases across five NATO countries, each on its own construction and delivery timeline. Some of that spending is driven by simple fleet replacement, swapping Lockheed Martin F-16s or Eurofighters for a stealthier jet, while some of it is driven by something far heavier: NATO’s nuclear-sharing mission, which requires a small handful of European bases to be rebuilt to standards few other airfields on the continent have ever had to meet.