Red Flag

The exercise is conducted using air, space, and more recently, cyber forces, and takes place north of Las Vegas on the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) which comprises nearly 40,000 square kilometres of airspace and 1. 2 million hectares of land. The range lies mostly on government land, and it offers 1,900 possible targets, fixed and mobile high fidelity surface to air threat systems, and airborne opposition ‘aggressor’ or ‘red air’ forces.

The concept of Red Flag is to replicate the first 10 combat missions a pilot will fly. The first Red Flag was conducted in 1975, and was born out of post-Vietnam air combat analyses which showed most pilots had little practice in air combat manoeuvring against dissimilar aircraft or against missile threats, and the majority of aircraft were lost during a pilot’s first 10 missions. Thus, it was determined that if a pilot/aircrew could survive their first 10 missions, their chances of survival in combat were dramatically increased.

Red Flag is conducted at three different levels depending on the participants. At least one Red Flag per year is conducted with US units only, drawn from the USAF, US Navy, US Marine Corps and other supporting US government agencies. A second standard is conducted with members of the ‘five eyes’ or FVEY grouping of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia (New Zealand is the fifth FVEY member).

And the third level of Red Flag is that which is attended by other allied and non-aligned nations including those from the NATO alliance, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, India, the UAE, Egypt, Israel, Sweden, Colombia, Chile and others.

Regardless of participants, each exercise is meticulously planned and specifically tailored to replicate threats and scenarios that the participating units/countries are likely to face in a coalition-type environment with each other and with the US.

Red Flag exercises are conducted by the USAF’s 414th Combat Training Squadron (CTS) which is an element of the 57th Wing based at Nellis. The 414 CTS is a non-flying organisation, but is tasked to organise and coordinate Red Flag exercises in conjunction with the 64th and 65th Aggressor Squadrons, and the 507th Air Defence Aggressor Squadron. The 64th flies the F-16C/D Viper, the 65th operates the F-15C/D Eagle, and the 507th operates the numerous surface-to-air threats spread across the range. Other aircraft and units are sometimes brought in as required to provide additional red air capabilities or threat scenarios.

Planning and workup

For the Australian units visiting Red Flag, planning commences at a command level about 12 months before the exercise, where senior members of the RAAF’s Air Command will commit to an exercise and attend planning conferences where the objectives are laid out.

Between three and six months before the exercise, the participating units and their parent wings will nominate personnel to attend.

“We picked it up in earnest about three months out, and we were really starting to understand what the orders were and who was coming and what they were expecting out of it,” exercise director and officer commanding 81WG, GPCAPT Robert Chipman, explains. “77 Squadron and 2 Squadron started doing their workup program three months out as well. ” The RAAF prefers to take a crosssection of crews to the exercise in order to provide a realistic representation of the unit’s structure, and as such crews will usually be a mix of ‘current converted to type’ (Category or Cat D), ‘operationally proficient’ (Cat C), or ‘highly proficient’ (Cat B) pilots.

“The selection process is across the whole wing,” says 81WG standards officer (STANDO) SQNLDR Ray Simpson. “We’re trying to look at who is going to be ready for an upgrade [to the next category] at a particular point – that’s part of our ‘raise, train and sustain’ process where we’re trying to get the guys who need to do a larger exercise to make the grade for the next component of training.

For us that’s the combat ready component – we call it the mission qualified component, or MQ. Part of my role at STANDO was to get the squadron executive officers together to work out who gets to go. People want to go so it gets quite contested, and we try and arbitrate that and make sure the right guys go for the right reasons. ” For the E-7 Wedgetail AEW&C crews of 2SQN, the planning and workup is slightly different. “We look at it from a point of it being an annual event for us in that January/February timeframe, so our approach is to lock it in to our longterm plan and a lot of what we do during the year is focused around that,” says commanding officer 2SQN, WGCDR Paul Carpenter.

On the first mission on day one this year it was a Wedgetail that was the package commander.

“We’re looking to get the crew composition largely mapped out six months in advance, so our series of workup plans culminate in the crew doing Red Flag Nellis.

“There’s no real ‘getting to know you’ or workup or integration training – the first mission is full on, and that’s the way we approach it,” Carpenter adds. “We’ve got crews doing a whole series of other exercises to get all their qualifications and upgrades and crew composition bedded down, and in the weeks leading up to Red Flag we’ll get our standardisation people to have a look at the crews, and I’ll be looking for a recommendation from my STANDO to say, ‘yep, these guys are ready to go. ’ We don’t treat it like a training exercise – it’s more of a proving exercise for us. We take it seriously because it’s such a fantastic opportunity and I don’t want to waste the first week just finding our feet. In fact, on the first mission on day one this year it was a Wedgetail that was the package commander for the whole command and control element. ” Typically, RAAF fast jet pilots who go to Red Flag will have already participated in lower tempo but no less important exercises such as Cope North, Bersama Lima or Pitch Black, and ideally, every Hornet pilot will attend one or more Red Flag exercises during their career. For Red Flag 14-1, the 81WG aircrew component comprised 24 F/A-18A/B classic pilots, of which 16 were the full complement of 77SQN.

“The 77SQN involvement in it was as one of those task units, and they were the lead squadron,” Chipman continues. “It was their aeroplanes, their maintenance personnel, and their planning. But we are now, from a wing perspective trying to manage our aircrew through the categorisation scheme and to make sure, depending on people’s experience that they’re exposed to the right training. What we try to do is to make sure all our future FCI candidates and all our guys undergoing a B-Cat upgrade were exposed to Red Flag. If they hadn’t seen one before, they were on this trip. ” The pilots from other parts of 81WG attending Red Flag attached themselves to 77SQN for the workup period which started in late October. The workup comprises academics which includes high fidelity simulator profiles of Nellis AFB and the NTTR, emergency simulators, mission profiles and ‘domestics’ or procedural familiarisations.

While the personnel planning is underway, fleet managers and senior engineering staff identify a number of suitable aircraft that will have sufficient maintenance hours to make the long ferry flights to and from the US and participate in the two-week exercise. In the case of large fleets such as the classic Hornet, it is also ideal that aircraft that have been upgraded to the latest configuration are taken across.

Like the Hornets, the Wedgetail crews also utilise their high-fidelity simulators to bed down their domestics and to practice high-tempooperations. “We’ve got a fantastic resource in terms of our front end sim and our operational mission sim in our ability to workup for these exercises, because we can replicate the airspace and all the activity that’s going on there,” says Carpenter. “The crews will be running through full Nellis scenarios in the sim before we go – the flow of all the fighters, escorts, strike, the EW aircraft and all that stuff, the whole process we can look at procedurally, the force marshalling for blue air, and getting on task. That’s a pretty big deal and a pretty busy time for us with 60 or 70 ‘blue air’ marshalling at any one time, plus who knows how many red air are marshalling at the same time.

“We’re looking for a spread (of experience) but we’re also looking for a crew that’s fully formed and doesn’t need upgrading at the actual exercise itself,” Carpenter adds.

“Next year we’ll have a larger pool of people who have seen Nellis, so they’ll understand the unique challenges they’re going to face.

We’ll make sure every time we go there from now on there’ll be some people who have seen it before and there’ll be some wide-eyed newbies who will get the surprise of their life. Typically we’ll take two crews and we’ll fly every day, because each crew gets to plan one day and fly the next. ”

Red Flag 14-1

The Australian element at Red Flag 14-1 was led by GPCAPT Chipman, and included elements across Air Combat Group (ACG) and Surveillance Response Group (SRG). “The recent practice in Air Force for Red Flag has been to form a task group,” Chipman says. “Within the task group we had a small headquarters element, we had 77SQN, 2SQN with an E-7 and two crews, a deployment from 114MCRU, and we had about 30 people who were working in the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Centre). So we had about 300 people all up, and that was the Australian footprint that went across. ” The Red Flag Hornets ferried across to Nellis from Williamtown via Anderson AFB on Guam and Hickam AFB in Hawaii. While a RAAF KC-30 MRTT was originally tasked to do the ferry, the aircraft became unavailable at the last minute and a contingency of USAF KC-10 and KC‑135 tankers was called upon. A KC-30 was able to ferry the aircraft home on the return journey.

And while eight Hornets left Williamtown, only seven made it to Nellis. The eighth ‘broke’ in Guam and was deemed to require too much work to continue on to Nellis in time for Red Flag, so instead remained in Guam to await 75SQN’s arrival two weeks later for Exercise Cope North.

The USAF contingent included a wide variety of aircraft including F-22 Raptors, F-16C/CJ/ CM Vipers, F-15C/D/E Eagles, EC-130 and HC‑130Js, B-2 Spirits, E-8C JointSTARS, HH-60 Pave Hawks, RC-135 Rivet Joints, KC- 135R tankers, E-3 AWACS, and the F-16 and F-15 aggressors. Also participating were F/A-18C/D Hornets and EA-6B Prowlers from the USMC, and EA-18G Growlers, P-3C Orion and EP-3C Aries aircraft from the US Navy.

The UK sent a squadron each of Eurofighter Typhoon FG. 4s and Panavia Tornado GR. 4s, plus an E-3D Sentry.

The threats provided by the aggressor aircraft are far more complex than just the F-15s and F-16s they fly. The aircraft are painted in desert brown, arctic black and white, or sea blue/grey schemes favoured by many former Soviet and Middle Eastern operators.

The aggressor pilots are also wellversed on adversary tactics, and often carry pods which emulate the radar or missile signatures of potential adversary aircraft such as the MiG‑21, -23 and -29 and the Su- 27/30 Flanker.

“The thing about the aggressor threat is, you need to work out whatmissile system is he carrying and, combined with his fire control radar and his self-protect stuff, that gives you a problem to solve,” explains Simpson. “Those guys have some pretty ‘pushed up’ weapons they were simulating from all over the world that we might see, combined with the ground threat. I think the key thing from this Red Flag was they were simulating an IADS (integrated air defence system), so they had air guys operating inside their own SAM missile engagement zones, so trying to shoot guys who were protected by SAMs, that’s a tough problem to solve. ” Typically, the aggressor fighters will launch ahead of the blue force aircraft and assemble over the western side of the NTTR. Once the blue force ‘push’ commences from the eastern and northern sides of the range, the aggressors are tasked with conducting defensive and offensive counter-air (DCA & OCA) operations against the attackers, and may also look to attack some of the high value assets such as tankers or AEW&C. Most of the fighters on both sides carry air combat manoeuvring instrument (ACMI) pods which record hits and misses in real-time during a dogfight, and record the data for de-briefing.

The NTTR’s ground threats are designed to simulate search and tracking radars associated with air defence systems such as the older Soviet era SA-2/3/5/8 series of surface-to-air-missile systems and the more modern SA-10/12/20 series, as well as other systems used by potential adversaries such as the Roland or the I-Hawk. Most of these threats are on fixed sites across the ranges, but systems such as the Roland are mobile and can ‘pop up’ at different locations in and around the ranges.

“The ground threats, certainly there are a lot of the older SAMs but they are simulating some of the new ones as well,” says Simpson. “In simple terms, they’ve chosen the best parts of everyone who we might have to deal with and put them in one area, which is pretty tough. But that’s really neat because you get flogged – we do have loss rates over there, and that’s good because you don’t learn unless you’re dying in training. You’re pretty busy and there’s a lot of stuff happening around you, and to try to stay on top of that and keep doing your job while everyone’s shooting at you, so that’s good. You don’t want that to happen on night one of a real conflict. ” Also spread across the NTTR is a diverse range of real and simulated targets. These can vary from a massive bullseye drawn on a dry lake bed, to an air defence system bunker complex, to an Afghan-style village which requires precise targeting to avoid collateral damage. There are also a number of unpaved airstrips on the range on which C-130s, C-17s or helicopters can land and insert or pick up special forces or recover ‘downed’ airmen.

New to Red Flag this year was an emphasis on cyber operations, where mission planners and aircraft maintainers were presented with ‘non-kinetic’ cyber threats during the exercise. Examples of such threats included spoof calls or emails to flight line maintenance, or false notifications that a tanker or other airborne asset won’t be available for a mission, or a general degradation of planning software and communications. As part of the exercise, planning and maintenance crews were tasked to discriminate and authenticate such information.

Goals and outcomes

The goals of attending a Red Flag are measured at different levels. “It varies in scale – we have some individual pilot training objectives,” says GPCAPT Chipman. “Theadvantage of Red Flag is it’s replicating that first 10 days of war so everyone who goes across gets immersed in a threat scenario and an operational scenario that we can’t generate in Australia, so it’s up-skilling our pilot workforce at a basic level. We’re trying to expose them to the sorts of roles they would be required to perform in war based on their category, so B-Cat would be leading 4-ships, C-Cat 2-ships, and that is where we’re pitching their exposure across there. ” “For me personally, I was looking to make sure the guys were executing to a level that was appropriate to their category,” adds Simpson. “Exposing them to different scenarios and seeing if they performed well and our tactics performed well enough in a high density environment was good – we have good airspace here [in Australia], but what we don’t have is a really dense threat.

“Those guys who had just been upgraded executed to their category pretty well, so from the wing’s point of view and as the STANDO, that went really well,” he says. “For the squadron they just want to see where they’re at – it’s a really good exclamation point to see how they compare to the other F/A-18s and fourth gen aircraft there, and we preformed pretty well. ” Simpson also said that Red Flag closely mimics the tempo of a real operational deployment. “I think, having spoken to guys who went to Operation Falconer in ’03, it feels very similar, and the guys were getting tired over time,” he says. “You’re working 12-14 hour days or nights, and you have to keep on top of your own body clock. The tempo felt pretty real – there’s the plan, then you brief it, you go fly it – the flights were about an hour and a half, and then the debriefs took up to 10 hours. We were maxing out crew

Those guys have some pretty ‘pushed up’ weapons they were simulating.

duty hours talking about everything that happened, individually, then collectively, then as a whole push before it’s all signed off. ” Chipman adds: “From an organisational perspective it is a real shakedown of the organisation in an operational environment. It is as close as we can possibly perceive that we would get to a real war, and everything gets tested in Red Flag. Everyone who’s participating, the aircrew, the maintenance folks, the intelos (intelligence officers) – all of them are constantly being exercised by the red forces.

“But it’s also a real shakedown of the capability, so we really get an opportunity to baseline how the upgraded Hornet performs in a modern air combat environment. It’s not a Raptor and it’s not a B-2, but when it’s used in conjunction with other assets, it’s very survivable and performs a useful role. So that’s very good to see, for example we get to see the performance of our new EW (electronic warfare pods and systems) and when we come back we either work out how we can improve that, or we take confidence in its performance in other areas. ” WGCDR Carpenter says Red Flag is also a learning opportunity for the whole ADF. “One of the outcomes of participating in Red Flag is building up the ADF’s knowledge as a whole, so it’s not just us at the unit level, but working with 81WG and 41WG, they see what we do and what we can do, and that is going to feed back into the system. We had personnel from Air Command come flying with us and they see what we’re doing in this sort of environment, and that will be filtering into other areas of the ADF. So the guys who are introducing the F-35 or Growler into the Air Force will be aware of where Wedgetail is

The flights were about an hour and a half, and then the debriefs took up to 10 hours.

at and what the system can offer. So we’re definitely feeding into the fifth gen side of things. ” GPCAPT Chipman was also upbeat about the RAAF’s capacity to work with fifth generation USAF capabilities such as the F-22, B-2 and the EA-18G Growler, and in the future, the F-35. “I think there are two elements to that,” he explains. “The first is, that’s where we learn about these capabilities and how important they are. There are things that we’re exposed to as part of that US air, space and cyber combat system that a lot of our guys didn’t know existed. So we get exposed to capabilities that we can then bring back to Australia to inform acquisition decisions for the future development of the RAAF.

“But the other element is to learn how to work together with those capabilities,” Chipman adds. “The reason that the US and ourselves are keen to exercise together is to achieve those interoperability outcomes that are so important. And one of the things you find is, while those fifth gen platforms are unbelievably capable, there’s just not enough of them. So you achieve a better effect with fourth generation and fifth generation fighters working together, it’s really effective. By the end of the second week it was really starting to click and all of a sudden we were really starting to achieve all those synergies and all of those things that we know are possible because people understood each other’s capabilities and were finding how to make them work together – so that’s a really key outcome of Red Flag. ” The post-exercise assessment for 2SQN validated that the squadron and the Wedgetail capability is headed in the right direction. “The jet is continually evolving, and that’s happening from a technical point of view but also from a crew procedures point of view,” WGCDR Carpenter says. “On the way to FOC it’s all about ‘grow, integrate and prepare’ – grow is to train more aircrew and get more spares; integrate is about integrating at the squadron level, to finalise all our internal procedures and how the crew work together, integrating with other ADF elements, and also at the coalition level; and then there’s the preparedness, now that we’re IOC we’re on the books and ready for tasking.

“The difference in just 12 months between the two Red Flags was outstanding, so we’re very happy with the way that’s all going,” Carpenter adds. “In terms of mission system performance, it’s part of that continual development cycle. Then you’ve got the crew operating procedures. That’s something that’s really improved markedly since we’ve built up our numbers and moved to fixed crews, because there’s an awful lot of non-verbal communication happening. Our aircrew need to understand how each other operates and how they coordinate the information around the jet.

“That type of thing cannot always be written down in a procedure, that sort of subjective communication can only be generated by a crew. I encourage the crews to have a bit of individuality – they’ve still got to operate within our standing instructions, but I want to leave plenty of latitude for the crew to come up with the best way of doing things and have a bit of freedom to innovate and solve complex problems they’ve never seen before and might never see again. ”

Best training available

“For us, Red Flag Nellis is the best training available without a doubt due to the nature of the range, the complexity of the problems that get thrown at the aircrew, and the diversity of the platforms and all the different units we get to work with,” Carpenter says in closing. “It’s our highest priority when it comes to exercising our crews, our mission system, our logistics, intel and mission support, and we put a lot into making sure we get the most out of it. It’s probably one of the pivotal things that we do, and the value of it is simply outstanding. We have KC-30 support for the Hornets, we had C-17s taking flyaway kits, we have 41WG involvement, so it’s not just 2SQN or 77SQN that turns up to Nellis, it’s the Royal Australian Air Force. It’s like a big block of capability that arrives in location, which gets back to my point on integration. ” GPCAPT Chipman says the RAAF crews more than held their own with their allies in the exercise. “When you step across the line in a Red Flag mission, it’s so impressive to see our guys perform,” he says. “When they come back from an early mission with wide eyes – it’s an overwhelming experience just trying to survive. But the really neat transition is, you see guys who will be like that for the first couple of missions, but then they start to get determined and disciplined in the way they do their threat defence manoeuvring, and they start coming back having survived and achieved their mission outcomes. And then you see some of the guys take that next step where they’re actually becoming masters of that environment and influencing the fight, they’re actually driving outcomes that you wouldn’t expect of a fourth generation fighter. It doesn’t make a Hornet a Raptor, but when you see a Hornet performing really well to its capabilities, that’s really impressive. ” “The performance of everyone in their roles was outstanding, and we left Nellis with our allies impressed by our performance. ”