NATO AWACS aircraft will deploy to Poland and Romania:
NATO said Monday it will deploy AWACS reconnaissance aircraft to overfly Poland and Romania as part of alliance efforts to monitor the crisis in Ukraine.
The flights "will enhance the Alliance's situational awareness," a NATO official said, adding: "All AWACS reconnaissance flights will take place solely over Alliance territory."
Flying from Poland up and down the Russian or Belarus borders will detect movement in those areas, but flying from Romania doesn't really give the AWACS the range to cover much of Ukraine in question:
Its pulse-Doppler radar has a range of more than 250 mi (400 km) for low-flying targets at its operating altitude, and the pulse "beyond the horizon" radar has a range of approximately 400 mi (650 km) for aircraft flying at medium to high altitudes.
I think we'd have to fly the aircraft out of Romania over the Black Sea in international waters to have real coverage, however.
UPDATE: Never mind. This seems fairly pointless:
The U.S.-led NATO defense alliance said AWACS early warning aircraft, once designed to counter feared Soviet nuclear missile strikes, would start reconnaissance flights on Tuesday over Poland and Romania to monitor the situation in Ukraine, flying from bases in Germany and Britain.
If the planes fly over Poland, they can see into Belarus. Big deal. No, flying them up over Estonia would have allowed the planes to peer into sensitive areas of Russia itself around St. Petersburg.
And if the planes fly over Romania, I don't think coverage could reach Crimea let alone into Russia east of the Kerch Strait.
So this is nothing unless you really think we need to guard against the Russians blowing through Belarus and Ukraine to invade Poland and Romania.
