In my lay-man‘s imagination, there will only be a few of these highway airstrips. And they are quite obvious, either from media reports, satellite images or when you drive along them in peacetime.
So the enemy will know and target them like your other airfields.
What am I getting wrong?
> What am I getting wrong?
Everything is muddy, nothing is guaranteed to work, the environment is unforgiving, people react differently under stress. We, they, everyone KNOW this and it still doesn't work.
So, you plan, you test contingencies, develop capability, even if they're never used.
In Germany, they had plans to use shopping centers as ad hoc aircraft bases. Knock large holes into the store front (they tend to not be load bearing), shove out all of the shelves and what not with a bulldozer, clear the parking lots of cars and lights (bulldozers work well for this as well). Boom, instant hangar and tarmac.
But that's just it, just warplans. Think tanks thinking through potential problems and ways to solve them. They also had warplans to blow up dams to wash over a teeming Soviet advance. Seems, in the large, to be a bad idea. But, on the other hand, consider the events and thinking going on when someone chimes in "Hey, maybe we should blow up the dams...".
Combat is very messy. No plan survives first contact. Just ask the Russians.
The enemy only has so many resources to target your resources. War has been, really for most of history, an economic struggle as much as a tactical one.
If they're planning an attack, they have to decide if the risk is worth the reward. They can't just magically hit all targets (or they can but that's because things go nuclear and hey, none of it really matters).
The more redundancies you have, the more likely you are to stop their attack, or to exhaust their ability to extend themselves. Given the absurd size of most road networks, that's a lot of potential targets to worry about, even if mostly undefended.
Not in Finland, where this military exercise occurred. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_90 and the earlier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_60 . I don’t have an exact count, but the number of Highway runways available in Finland is on the order of like 50.
And sure, these are well known and mapped. And yes, an enemy could target each and every one of them. But to do so they would need far more ordnance to destroy all these highways instead of just a few runways. But there’s some additional context. So, the most efficient way to disable an air base (or improvised air base using a highway) is to destroy the runway, preventing aircraft from taking off. But, it’s also the easiest thing to fix. Just takes some bulldozers and engineers and you can get it fixed relatively easily. So runway cratering is more about suppressing an Air Force instead of destroying it. Generally, you want to follow up those runway strikes with additional strikes to target the aircraft on the ground. And that is a lot harder when they are scattered all over the country.
This being Norway, I expect they have quite a bit of that. The country is reasonably large (385,000km²), population density is fairly low (15 persons/km²), so in large parts of the country roads won’t be busy and don’t need much infrastructure.
edit: you can clearly see in satellite images the strip in question here, its significantly wider than the surrounding road and additionally has been recently repaved: https://maps.app.goo.gl/teYJ7wzbTzcfwngB6
https://youtu.be/eEX8JJ0eXL4 (part of it at around 3m30s)
In Finland there is hundreds of them of various levels of preparedness while we only have 4 actual air force bases.
Some of them have nice extra wide tarmac, bunkers hidden in the forest to store gear, etc. These are the ones used during peace time for practice.
During wartime if those are destroyed you use the less prepared ones which are just normal roads with a long enough straight and no bridges etc. You go and cut down the trees and electricity poles next to the road, fill any potholes and use that.
In the end all you really need is a road wide enough to fit the landing gear of the plane and enough length to speed up / slow down. Though obviously you use the better/nicer ones if you can (especially during peace time)
I do agree with the other sibling responses, though -- bombs cost money, and there's a lot of roadway that would need to be bombed in order to render entire highway systems unusable. So that's probably where the "win" comes in -- being nimble in takeoff / landing of aircraft locations makes life much more difficult for the enemy.
The F-35A is a bit different in that its a normal air force fighter. This is just proving that if push comes to shove it can be operated out of improvised bases.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35b-just-touched-dow...
Regarding Ukraine, if it is internet grief, it is fair to assume it is wrong.
You need: A fuel Truck A munitions truck People
And that's really it. That means you can put an airstrip anywhere that's long enough and relatively smooth. If you have alot of highways, you're good to go, and, in most places, you can land, then park the jet off the highway with a tug (read: ATV with a hitch adapter) and it's trivial to keep it out of sight because even with the best tech available, it's just not possible to have eyes everywhere, all the time.
Genuine question. Seems a bit much if it’s just resupplying fuel and munitions, not that I know much about this.
If you're in a position where, your airfields are getting holes blown in them, getting forces back up in the air is more important than having a guy double check a bunch of things that are probably fine anyway.
>Breaking down the engineering requirement for the three F-35 variants across the programme, the projected mean flight hour between failure was 10 hours for the conventional F-35A (from a requirement of six hours), seven hours for the STOVL F-35B (from a requirement of four hours), and 10.3 hours for the F-35C (from a requirement of four hours).
Failure suggests it has to be serviced, I’m not sure how that’s exactly defined or if that flight hour number is for airframes receiving regular scheduled maintenance (which is substantial) or not.
It certainly appears discordant with your statement of: “double check a bunch of things that are probably fine anyway.” Unless “failure” refers to non critical systems which may or may not be the case.
I’m wondering if you are speaking based on knowledge / experience or conjecture as I have not read much on the topic beyond random news/magazine articles over the years and don’t know the answers to these.
There is obviously still merit in being able to land outside of airbases but your description made it seem like this is a sustainable strategy rather than a backup landing and emergency take off situation 1-3 times to not lose the airframe.
https://www.key.aero/article/lockheed-martin-reveals-f-35-ma...
You'd be surprised at how many failures an aircraft is allowed to fly with, and, more than likely, unless you've flown on a brand new aircraft, you've flown exclusively on aircraft that had a dozen or more things that are wrong with them that need to be repaired. The military world is no different, and with lockheed's nepotic service contract on these jets, I'm sure they get grounded for all sorts of trivial stuff.
See how Ukraine is using roads to hide its warplanes and site decoys.