Of every fifth-generation stealth fighter flying anywhere in the world today, such as the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, the F-35A, the F-35B, the F-35C, Russia's Sukhoi Su-57, and China's Chengdu J-20, just one of them can land on a closed stretch of public highway, refuel, rearm, and take off again without a single piece of arrestor gear, a prepared runway surface, or thousands of feet of paved length. That aircraft is the F-35B, and the reason it can do this traces back to a single piece of engineering, the shaft-driven lift fan, that came so close to sinking the entire F-35 program in the early 2000s that senior Pentagon officials seriously discussed canceling the STOVL variant outright.

From June 8 to June 12, 2026, US Marine Corps F-35Bs from VMFA-224 landed and took off repeatedly from a closed road strip in Tervo, Finland, roughly 200 miles (322 kilometers) from the Russian border. By the end of this article, you will understand exactly why that engineering detail, and not the exercise itself, is the part of the story that actually matters to NATO's defense posture against Russia.

What Actually Happened In Tervo: The Numbers Behind The Headline

According to the official account published by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, US Marine Corps F-35B Lightning IIs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 224 (VMFA-224), part of Marine Aircraft Group 31 and the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conducted landing and takeoff operations on a highway strip in Tervo, Finland, from June 8 to 12, 2026.

The event also marked the first time Polish and Spanish military aircraft operated from a Finnish roadway, and it was the first deployment of US Marine Corps F-35s to Finland specifically — though notably, it followed the cancellation of a planned USMC F-35 deployment to Norway's Cold Response exercise the preceding March. The Tervo highway operations took place during Ramstein Flag 2026, NATO's premier multi-domain tactical exercise, which, according to DVIDS, involved 18 nations and more than 15 operational locations stretching from northern Norway to southern Spain.

Tervo’s location is the detail that gives the exercise its strategic weight. The site sits approximately 200 miles (322 km) from the Russian border. Rovaniemi, Rissala, and Tampere Pirkkala are Finland’s permanent air bases — fixed, mapped, and familiar to any adversary’s targeting planners. A closed section of Highway 5 near Tervo is none of those things, and it can be activated or deactivated within hours.

United States Air Force Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, commander of Allied Air Command, framed the exercise's purpose directly in the DVIDS release: “This iteration of Ramstein Flag stretches from the northernmost parts of Norway to the southern reaches of Spain, showcasing Allied Airpower's 360-degree approach to defend every inch of NATO territory. “

The operation involved F-35Bs working alongside Spanish McDonnell Douglas F-18s and Polish F-16s, with forward arming and refueling point (FARP) support provided by Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, the unit responsible for getting fuel and munitions to an aircraft sitting on a public road in the Finnish countryside, fast.

Why The Other F-35 Variants Could Never Have Done This Operation

The distinction between the F-35B and its conventional siblings matters more than it might first appear. According to Forces News, which covered the Italian Air Force's pioneering highway operation in Finland the previous month, the F-35B's lift fan and swiveling rear nozzle allow it to slow, hover, and land vertically on temporary strips, a capability the F-35A and F-35C simply do not possess in any form.

The F-35A, the conventional takeoff and landing variant flown by the US Air Force and most international customers, requires a hard, reasonably long, and reasonably straight runway surface to land safely, just like any other conventional jet. When the Royal Norwegian Air Force pioneered Finland's highway exercises with F-35As back in Baana 23, and when the USAF's 495th Fighter Squadron followed in 2024, both aircraft needed enough closed roadway to execute a normal landing roll, typically several thousand feet, even with reduced approach speeds.

The F-35B does not play by those rules. As Simple Flying has detailed in its analysis of the F-35's thermal management architecture, the F-35B's STOVL system represents one of the most significant engineering achievements in the entire Joint Strike Fighter program. The aircraft splits lift generation between its rear swiveling exhaust nozzle and a large, 48-inch (1.22-meter) diameter Rolls-Royce LiftFan positioned directly behind the cockpit, mechanically driven off the main F135-PW-600 engine through a clutch and driveshaft assembly.

Together, the LiftFan and the redirected main engine thrust generate approximately 40,000 lbf (177.93 kN) of combined vertical thrust, enough to support a single-engine fighter weighing over 32,000 pounds (14,500 kg) empty in a stable hover, then settle it onto the ground with no forward roll required at all.

That is what separates the Tervo and Jokioinen operations from every other NATO highway exercise. An F-35A or F-35C performing a "highway landing" is, in engineering terms, performing a conventional landing on an unconventional surface, impressive logistically, but aerodynamically identical to landing on any sufficiently long stretch of pavement. The F-35B performing the same mission can land in a fraction of the distance, on a road segment too short or too obstructed for a conventional jet, and, in a true emergency, it does not strictly need forward roll-out distance at all. That is the entire reason the Marine Corps and the Italian Air Force, not the Air Force's conventional F-35A units, were chosen to demonstrate the doctrine's most extreme version.

The Lift Fan That Almost Killed The F-35 Program

The engineering irony at the center of this story is rarely discussed outside specialist circles, and it is the part of the Tervo deployment that genuinely deserves more attention than the highway footage. The F-35B's STOVL system was, for several years in the mid-2000s, the single greatest threat to the entire Joint Strike Fighter program's survival.

The aircraft's weight grew so far beyond original projections during development that, in late 2003 and into 2004, the program faced what insiders at the time called the "STOVL weight crisis": the F-35B's airframe, loaded down with the lift-fan mechanism, the swivel-nozzle assembly, and roll-control ducting in the wings, was projected to be too heavy to meet its vertical-lift performance requirements at all.

The fix required a near-total structural redesign across all three F-35 variants, adding cost and schedule delays that rippled through the entire program and contributed directly to the F-35's reputation, sustained for over a decade afterward, as the most expensive and troubled fighter program in history. As Simple Flying has noted in its comparison of cockpit and flight-control differences between the F-35 and F-22, the STOVL system's complexity extends well beyond the lift fan itself: roll posts embedded in each wing, fed by bleed air from the main engine, provide the lateral stability control that allows the pilot to balance the aircraft during the genuinely difficult transition between aerodynamic lift and vertical jet lift. As examined by Simple Flying, one of the reasons for Lockheed's X-35 demonstrator victory over Boeing's competing X-32 was the STOVL transition, judged dramatically more controllable in the Lockheed Martin aircraft.

The same system that nearly sank the program on a cost and schedule basis is, two decades later, the main feature of NATO's Agile Combat Employment doctrine in Finland. Every other element of ACE doctrine, including dispersed fuel caches, mobile maintenance teams, and pre-surveyed road sites, could, generally, be replicated for a conventional jet, given enough runway length. The F-35B's vertical landing capability removes the runway-length constraint entirely, which is precisely what allows planners to select road sites based on tactical concealment and proximity to the front rather than on whether the straight section happens to be long enough for a fast jet's landing roll.

Why Finland Has Been Practicing This Since The Cold War

The road-based doctrine developed by Finland came decades earlier than the F-35B, reflecting a uniquely Finnish strategic problem: a long, exposed border with Russia, a relatively small population from which to draw a large standing air force, and Cold War-era certainty that any conflict would target fixed air bases within the opening hours.

According to Daily Northern's coverage of Imminent Field 26, the Jokioinen road base used for Italy's May 2026 deployment can be closed and operational within hours — the exercise organizers shut Highway 2 early on a Monday morning and were conducting flight operations by 9:00 AM the following Tuesday. Colonel Markus Leivo, commander of the Satakunta Air Command, noted that in a genuine crisis, the activation timeline could be compressed even further.

The exercise series, known internally as Baana for years before adopting the NATO designation Imminent Field, hosted F-35 detachments in some form for four consecutive years, each one adding a layer of capability. The Aviationist's reporting on the Italian deployment traces the full sequence: Norway's conventional F-35As opened the series at Baana 23 in 2023, the USAF's 495th Fighter Squadron followed with the first American fighter highway operation in 2024, the Netherlands joined in 2025, and Italy's F-35Bs introduced the STOVL variant to the program for the first time in May 2026, just weeks before the Marine Corps' Tervo deployment under Ramstein Flag.

The shift from F-35A to F-35B in recent NATO drills reflects a deliberate effort to push the boundaries of dispersed operations. With the A model, the question was whether a stealth fighter could operate from an unconventional surface at all, and the answer was yes, provided the strip offered enough usable length.

The B model takes that logic a step further. Its STOVL performance removes the runway length requirement entirely, opening the door to operations from surfaces that would be unusable for any other fifth-generation jet. That’s the version of the concept with real operational weight, because it’s the one that still works when a road network is damaged, cratered, or partially destroyed — the exact scenario Finnish and NATO planners are preparing for.

The Marine Corps Angle: Why VMFA-224 Specifically Mattered

The choice of a Marine Corps squadron for the Tervo deployment connects to a broader structural shift inside US Marine aviation that gives the F-35B's highway capability added institutional weight. VMFA-224 transitioned to the F-35B in 2025, part of the Marine Corps' ongoing fleet recapitalization. According to Stars and Stripes, the Marine Corps recently retired its McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) AV-8B Harrier II fleet entirely, which means the F-35B is now the Marine Corps' sole STOVL aircraft. Every Marine Corps fast-jet expeditionary capability now runs through the Lightning II's B variant specifically.

That consolidation raises the stakes of exercises like Tervo considerably. The Harrier, for all its limitations, was a genuinely simpler aircraft: a single Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine vectoring exhaust through four rotating nozzles, generating one concentrated hot jet blast that famously could damage unprepared surfaces and limited how long the aircraft could safely hover.

As already examined by Simple Flying, the F-35B's split-thrust architecture, distributing lift between the cooler LiftFan exhaust forward and the vectored main engine nozzle aft, produces a more balanced and less surface-damaging footprint, which is part of why an exercise involving a closed public highway, rather than a reinforced military pad, was operationally plausible in the first place.

With the Harrier retired and the F-35B now carrying the entire weight of Marine STOVL doctrine alone, Tervo functioned as a validation exercise for the Marine Corps' post-Harrier expeditionary concept as much as it did for NATO's broader dispersed-airpower strategy.

What This Capability Actually Changes For NATO's Eastern Flank

The strategic logic behind Agile Combat Employment rests on a simple premise: a fixed air base is a target an adversary can plan years in advance to destroy with the opening salvo of any conflict. Modern precision-guided munitions and ballistic missiles have made permanent runways a liability rather than an asset in the opening hours of a peer conflict.

Dispersing combat aircraft across dozens or hundreds of possible locations, only a handful of which are activated at any given time, forces an adversary's targeting apparatus to spread its attention across a problem space orders of magnitude larger than "find and destroy the air base." The F-35B's vertical landing capability is the single technical element that makes that dispersion genuinely unconstrained by runway geometry, rather than merely constrained by a shorter, more flexible runway geometry.

As Migflug's analysis of the May 2026 Imminent Field exercise observed, Finland's road-base doctrine functions as a "deterrence loop" precisely because the unpredictability of where an F-35B might appear next complicates an adversary's targeting calculus far more effectively than a fixed network of known alternate airfields ever could.

The F-35B is the only operational stealth fighter on Earth that can land vertically on a road with no meaningful surface-length requirement, and the lift-fan system responsible for that capability is now the specific engineering reason NATO's distributed Agile Combat Employment doctrine against Russia is operationally real rather than aspirational.