A highway strip, road runway or road base is a section of a highway, motorway or other form of public road that is specially built to act as a runway for (mostly) military aircraft and to serve as an auxiliary military air base. These runways allow military aircraft to continue operating even if their regular air bases, some of the most vulnerable targets in any war, are degraded or destroyed.
The first highway strips were constructed near the end of World War II in Nazi Germany, where the well developed Reichsautobahn system allowed aircraft to use the motorways. During the Cold War highway strips were systematically built on both sides of the Iron Curtain, in many cases in response to the Six Day War and Operation Focus in 1967, where the Israeli Air Force in a surprise air strike disabled many of their opponents' air bases in just a few hours.[1][2] Countries that have built highway strips include both West and East Germany, Singapore, North Korea, Taiwan, Sweden, Finland, Bulgaria, Switzerland (military significance),[3] Poland, India, Pakistan and Czechoslovakia.
- ^ "1967 Middle East War". BBC. Retrieved 1 May 2019.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:2was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Swiss Air Force, Uno Zero Zero – Ein Jahrhundert Schweizer Luftwaffe Archived 15 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Aeropublications, 2013, 324 pages (ISBN 978-3-9524239-0-5).