NATO Rewrites Its Iceland Mission: Belgian F-16s Take Over an Air Policing Job That No Longer Means What It Did

NATO’s westernmost air mission is quietly changing shape. The Iceland deployment the alliance has rotated through since 2008 is moving from standalone air policing to an integrated air and missile defence posture — and the Belgian Air Force has drawn the first watch under the new framing.

The Belgian detachment arrived at Keflavik Air Base on 7 August and formally assumed responsibility on 17 August. The F-16 deployment is scheduled to run for a month.

What actually changes

Classic air policing is a narrow task. When an aircraft goes unidentified or departs its filed flight plan, quick reaction alert fighters scramble, identify it visually, and shepherd it out if required. The architecture assumes the threat is an aircraft with a pilot in it.

Integrated air and missile defence does not leave the fighter standing alone. NATO’s framing brings QRA aircraft, sea-based air defence, surface-based air defence and counter-uncrewed systems under one chain of command and one recognised air picture. Cruise missiles, ballistic threats and small drones — profiles that share almost nothing operationally — get handled inside a single architecture instead of three.

Major General Frank Gräfe, Chief of Staff at NATO Allied Air Command, explained the shift in terms of emerging and future threats, “whether crewed or uncrewed.” Senior Captain Glenn Hanssen, commanding the Belgian detachment, noted that Belgian F-16s had touched down in Iceland once again to help safeguard alliance airspace.

Why Iceland is a special case

Iceland is a founding NATO member with no armed forces of its own. Its airspace security has therefore always been an allied responsibility, delivered through rotation. Keflavik spent the Cold War watching the corridor Soviet long-range maritime patrol and bomber aircraft used to reach the Atlantic.

The same geography matters again because of the GIUK gap — the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom maritime chokepoint through which Russian submarines and surface units from the Northern Fleet must pass to reach the Atlantic. It is also the water under which the undersea data cables and energy links connecting Europe and North America run. After a run of cable and pipeline damage in the Baltic and North Sea, protecting that infrastructure has climbed NATO’s agenda.

Infrastructure and successor fleets

The United States ended its permanent presence at Keflavik in 2006, and no fighter squadron is based there today. The base has instead been modernised to support allied rotations and maritime patrol operations, with shelter and maintenance work aimed at platforms such as the P-8A Poseidon. Iceland’s own contribution is a national air defence system built around four fixed radar sites feeding NATO’s integrated network.

For Belgium, the deployment carries a note of transition. The country is replacing its F-16 fleet with the F-35A and has committed part of its remaining Vipers to Ukraine. Keflavik is close to a farewell tour for airframes that have carried allied taskings for decades.

Part of a wider redesign

The Iceland change should be read alongside Eastern Sentry, the enhanced vigilance activity NATO launched on its eastern flank in September 2025 with the same logic: move air defence away from a fighter-centric model toward a layered one. The experience driving it is Ukraine’s, where cheap uncrewed systems have consistently found the seams in airspace defended by expensive interceptors.