Red Flag, like all exercises of its kind, is designed to allow today's military aircrews the opportunity to practice and refine their tactics in a simulated wartime situation - but few exercises can match Red Flag for the sheer scale and realism on offer.
The brainchild of then Major (later Colonel) Richard M "Moody" Suter, Red Flag was conceived, just like the US Navy's Top Gun fighter programme, as a result of the United State's poor showing during the conflict in Southeast Asia.
As he travelled from airbase to airbase both during and after the conflict, Moody Suter was noting down ideas garnered from bars and conversations with aircrew and these notes shared one common thread - their training just wasn't going far enough and did little to prepare crews for the realities of air combat. It was apparent that, if aircrew could survive their first ten real combat missions, then they had a far greater chance of surviving to the end of the war.
It was General Robert J Dixon, commander of Tactical Air Command, who saw the true value in Suter's ideas and just a short while after formulating a plan to use them, Red Flag was born. The first Red Flag exercise was held at the Nellis Air Force Base in November 1975 and was designed to be the most realistic exercise ever created, giving aircrews the experience of those first ten missions in the safety of the skies over Nevada. More than thirty years later it remains an invaluable tool, training crews from across the globe for "real world" operations and is hosted by the 414th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis AFB, NV.
The global nature of Red Flag should not be underestimated with so many of the world's air forces operating as part of a multi-national coalition on operations today. For many crews Red Flag gives them a chance to not only practice their own tactics in a simulated wartime environment, but to do so alongside the air forces which they may well find themselves operating with for real.
Often described as being almost the size of Switzerland, the Nellis range is what sets Red Flag apart from other exercises of the same nature. More than ten million acres of controlled airspace is available, of which some seventy percent is a military operation area (MOA) in which participants can fly supersonically between 100 and 50,000 feet. For Red Flag specifically, the Nevada Test and Training Range covers an impressive 120 square nautical miles, or one million acres, and is a harsh desert environment with open plains, mountains, valleys and dry lakes.
Red Flag works by splitting participating forces into two teams - the Blue Air (good guys) and the Red Air, or aggressors (the bad guys). A scenario will be prepared for each Flag within which the crews are able to train with live ammunition and take in all the differing facets of air combat; air-to-air, electronic countermeasures, air superiority, strike attack, close air support, combat search and rescue, in-flight refuelling and Airborne Early Warning (AEW).
The training area is packed full with technology simulating the kind of threats that crews are likely to face in a real wartime situation such as radars, simulated anti-aircraft artillery and even surface to air missiles. Red Flag missions are flown both during the day and at night with normal Flag operations comprising of two launches per day - day/day or day/night.
The Red Force role is tasked to the Nellis based 64th and the 65th Aggressor Squadrons flying F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-15 Eagles respectively, and painted in a variety of camouflage patterns to approximate some real world and potential adversaries, but to also serve as an old fashioned visual differentiation between Red or Blue Force aircraft.
Sometimes extra adversaries are brought in - recently the F-5 Tiger IIs from VMFT-401 were utilised to add an element of surprise for the Blue Forces. Civilian contractors are no longer allowed to participate in Red Flag as they are in other exercises and the pilots who fly on the Aggressor squadrons are some of the most experienced in the USAF.
One of the most famous elements at Red Flag, the Aggressor squadrons came in to being shortly before Red Flag itself as a result of the Red Baron Report which analysed almost every air to air engagement during the war over Vietnam. The lessons learned indicated a need to change the way in which pilots trained for air to air combat; it needed to be more realistic and against aircraft similar to those being operated by the perceived 'enemy'. This of course was the Soviet Union with their prolific MiG-21 and so it was that on the 10th October 1972 the 64th Fighter Weapons Squadron, later the 64th Aggressor Squadron, was formed, operating the Northrop F-5E Tiger II.
Red Air usually sets up at the western side of the Nellis Ranges for a Red Flag exercise, while Blue Air sets up in the east, their objective being to destroy fixed and mobile assets while the Red Force is in place to try to thwart these efforts.
After detailed briefings the order of play usually sees the E-3 Sentry getting airborne (call sign "Disco") to take up a position high over the Nellis ranges. Next the tanker assets for the Blue and Red Forces will fly to their refuelling tracks to allow the jets to stay out for the duration of the sortie. There then flows a steady stream of fighters and bombers and, when the Flags are especially busy, you can find aircraft are still departing while others are already in their recovery phase having completed their missions.
Flags can compromise anything from seventy aircraft to more than one hundred and twenty, depending on resources and objectives. In addition, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are beginning to take a more active role in exercise missions flying from the nearby Creech AFB.
Most Flags last about two weeks and, as the exercise progresses, then the missions will change as they would in a real world scenario. In the early stages the Blue and Red Forces battle for air superiority and later on Combat Air Patrol (CAP) missions will be flown to support assets now moving on the ground.
Red Flag attracts participants not just from United States forces but from across the globe and remains, undoubtedly, the mother of all military exercises.
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2009-09-21 - Nev Feist Growler Ed
Yes very nice Paul, but can they kill submarines?
Shackleton and Nimrod Navigator.
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