• Exercise Air Defender 23, the largest air deployment exercise in NATO history, will be held in

ABOUT EXERCISE

• The Air Defender 23 exercise will see 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member country.
• The exercise will be held across Germany, with some of the training taking place at Ramstein Air Base, which is one of NATO’s largest air bases.
• The exercise is being held in response to the increased threat posed by Russia following its invasion of The exercise is designed to demonstrate NATO’s readiness to respond to any threat to its airspace.
• A total of 25 nations are actively participating in Air Defender 23. These include Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION (NATO)

• It is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April, 1949, by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
• There are currently 31-member
• Its original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Joining the original signatories were Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955, from 1990 as Germany), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020), and Finland (2023).
• Headquarters: Brussels, Belgium