The Quest for Relevant Air Power

ROYAL NETHERLANDS Air Force │ 263
The THG, combining transport and Apache combat helicopters,
and the Royal Netherlands Army’s 11th Air Mobile Brigade
are integrated into the “blue-green” Air Manoeuvre Brigade. As of
October 2003, the brigade reached full operational readiness in
Poland. 216 It can be deployed as a whole or in smaller modules. 217
The well-balanced mixture of transport and combat helicopters
gives the THG the ability to carry out diverse tasks across the entire
spectrum of force, and it underlines the thrust towards integrated
air-land operations.
C4ISTAR
Multinational cooperation in the domain of C4ISTAR is fully
in line with the Netherlands’ defence and alliance policy. Being
closely integrated into NATO and the emerging ESDP, the Netherlands
can benefit from international cooperation and thereby
overcome the limits imposed by the size of its GDP. It is for exactly
this reason that the Netherlands became a member of NATO’s
Airborne Early Warning and Control Force in the early 1980s. 218
On a tactical level, reconnaissance pods have provided the RNLAF
with an autonomous air-to-ground reconnaissance capability. The
latest systems in the arsenal of the RNLAF are six Israeli-supplied
Rafael RecceLite sensor pods equipped with electro-optical cameras
and data links for providing real-time intelligence. The contract
was signed on 17 November 2005. 219
Due to financial restraints, however, the Netherlands forewent
a number of bi- and multilateral projects in the field of reconnaissance
and surveillance in recent years. As such, it bailed out of the
French-led Helios 2 satellite programme as well as a Franco-Dutch
MALE RPA project. 220 As of 2009, the Netherlands—against the
logic of the Dutch cooperation rationale—is also no longer a
member state in the multilateral NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance
Core project. 221 Due to this lack of national intelligence assets,
the Dutch Patriot units stationed in Turkey during Operation
Iraqi Freedom relied upon American intelligence on potential
missile launches, and the RNLAF fighter community as well had
sufficient access to US intelligence in air campaigns, which was
provided on a need-to-know basis. 222