Inside the War Games for U.S. Air Force Fighter Pilots
This week fighter jocks role-play bad guys trying to shoot down the U.S. Air Force's most advanced warplane—the F-22 Raptor—and "die wholesale" in the process. The Air National Guard 174th Fighter Wing will be flying training missions over the desert outside Nellis Air Force Base in a high-stakes war game. Here are the pilots who train against the deadliest dogfighter in the world.
By Joe Pappalardo
Published on: April 1, 2009
This week, warplanes from the Air National Guard 174th Fighter Wing will be flying training missions over the desert outside Nellis Air Force Base, trying desperately to compete during simulated combat over the high Nevada desert. Their foes are F-22 Raptors, stealth airplanes that can identify and destroy foes before their targets even know they are there.
The stakes are high—careers can be made and pilots' lives ended as dozens of warplanes share airspace in faux combat. To add to the pressure, this mission will be the Syracuse, N.Y.–based air wing's last deployment in F-16 fighters. In 2010 the wing will be assigned to fly armed drones by joystick, ending more than 60 years of manned aircraft operations.
"I'm honored to have the privilege of leading this detachment on its last deployment in the F-16," says Lt. Col. D. Scott Brenton, deputy operations group commander with the 174th Fighter Wing. "I can think of no better place to take a fighter wing on its last deployment than to Nellis." The name of the game is training, not victory, in this last mission—after all, they will be facing the most sophisticated airplane in the world.
Brenton (call sign "Gripper") has flown the F-16 for 20 years and has close to 4000 hours, including 750 hours of combat. He is also a former Weapons School instructor pilot at Nellis, the same program in which the 174th today is testing its mettle against the Raptor. He doesn't like to lose, but against the F-22 he has little choice. "Fighter pilots are competitive by nature. When the F-22 first became operational, most F-16 and F-15 pilots relished the challenge of going up against it," he says. "I know I did. That is, until I actually did it and discovered how humbling an experience it really was."
The F-22's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, and the Air Force cite a 30:1 kill ratio between Raptors and their prey. That doesn't equate to one F-22 taking on dozens of enemies; the figure means that for every Raptor shot down, 30 opposing airplanes are expected to be killed. "The F-22 was not built to fight a fair fight," Brenton says.
The Art of Losing
No U.S. airplane—or any other in the world—can match the F-22 in a dogfight during combat training. To get experience in realistic battle conditions, Raptor pilots—always the Blue Team— are training with U.S. pilots who serve as adversaries, or "Red Teams." Last week, Raptor pilots finished training against Navy F-15s and F/A-18 Super Hornets in Japan. This month, Nellis is hosting F-22s at the 2009 Red Flag wargames, a six-week, multinational training exercise held at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska and at Nellis.
F-22s dominate at Red Flag as well. Red Teams flying F-16s and F-15s take them on. Those who train to be the adversaries at Red Flag belong to the 64th and 65th Aggressor squadrons. These seasoned Red Team veterans find it frustrating to fight what they can't see. "Aggressor pilots are not typical Air Force line units. They tend to have much more experience," says Mike Estrada, a spokesman at the air base. "And I can tell you that our Aggressor pilots are getting very tired of always getting shot down by the F-22."
The reputation of the Raptor is evident in the pride that some take in downing one in simulated combat. A photo surfaced on an aviation website that recently caused a stir when the unnamed pilot of a surveillance aircraft said the silhouette of a warplane he painted on his fuselage was an F-22 that he helped locate and shoot down during an exercise. "Some Navy pilots like to brag if they even lock on to a Raptor," says one Air Force officer.
Learning Potential of a One-Sided Fight
In late March, Brenton's pilots faced F-22s at the Weapons Instructor Course (WIC), an intensive six-month training session that qualifies graduates to train other F-22 pilots from their respective units. Unlike Red Flag, WIC is a classroom, with lessons taught in the air as well as behind desks. The students' adversaries come from Air Force active-duty squadrons, National Guard and Reserve units, Navy and Marine tactical aviation units and from the indigenous Adversary Tactics Squadrons stationed at Nellis.
Red Team pilots trying to shoot down Raptors study intelligence reports about foreign countries' air forces and operate their own aircraft, missiles and radar to emulate the emerging threats and give their opponents a tough time. However, the disparity between the Raptor, which can evade enemy radar and shoot from farther away, means that Red Teams usually get the call over their radio that they have been killed before they even know the fight started.
"My F-16 is still a formidable weapons system in its own right. But it is not even in the same league as an F-22," Brenton says. "Technology keeps the F-22 a virtually undetectable and untouchable regime. It is fair to say that unless an F-22 driver makes a mistake, or has a critical system failure, I will always lose a fight against him. That is a good thing. As a nation, we want it this way. We also want him to be able to handle two, six or eight of us completely on his own."
The Weapons Instructor Course is a grueling test of an Air Force pilot's skill and endurance. Those who graduate receive "the patch"—a distinctive gray with red and black crosshairs, worn on the left shoulder. A new patch was designed in 2009 with 22 aircraft and weapons systems included, a reflection of the program's increasing scope. Unmanned aircraft that carry weapons, for example, are now part of the training.
These days only 30 percent of the graduates are fighter jocks, according to the Air Force. Weapons system professionals, air weapons controllers, intelligence officers, special operations troops and other specialties are also schooled here. WIC's graduation exercise, called Mission Employment (ME) brings all the different elements together for a wargame at Nellis. "ME is equivalent in size and scope to a Red Flag mission, but it is far more advanced," Breton says. These are full scenarios that push already exhausted pilots and other officers to their limits.
The fighters are not at WIC only to dogfight. The Raptor pilots have to learn the best ways here to defeat other threats, like advanced surface-to-air missiles, and to conduct close air support and other missions. A typical flying mission begins the day before the flight, Breton says, when students are assigned a high-value target on the ground that they are expected to protect for about thirty minutes. The students are given the mission specifics that are designed to challenge their problem-solving skills, such as the presence of unknown tactical surface-to-air missile sites, unexpectedly restrictive political borders and even the presence of other friendly or defecting aircraft in the scenario. The day prior to the mission the students will all convene in a mission-planning area to review their tasks, assign specific duties, and develop an overall approach to tackling the tasks at hand. The day of the flight will be a 12-hour marathon—at minimum— for the students and instructors. "This is routine here at WIC," Brenton says. "In fact, all aviators have to be out of the building 12 hours prior to showing up the day of a flying mission. Nevertheless, they often continue refining the details of their plans and rehearsing their briefings well into the evening back in their quarters."
Into the Fight
Following an hour and a half of mission briefings, the pilots suit up and go to their aircraft. At Nellis, the airspace is immense, and the terrain can be extreme. High-desert mountain ranges with jagged peaks several thousand feet in elevation punctuate the desolate landscape between dry lakebeds and smooth salt flats. "There are very few restrictions to airspeeds and altitudes out here, which allows us to train like we intend to fight," Brenton says. "The extreme terrain adds additional tactical problems for students to solve, since radar-equipped aircraft have numerous blind zones behind ridges and surveillance radars cannot always see to the surface."
The faux combat in the air is followed by the Nellis Air Combat Tracking System, which allows real-time tracking of all surface and air participants, including ground threats. On the ground, a telemetry system receives data from small pods that are attached to the aircraft. The data is used by instructors on the ground to conduct safety checks and to coordinate the removal of "killed" airplanes. Brenton says the fights are complex and dangerous. "I equate them to solving a 1000-mph, three-dimensional chess game where the loser dies," he says. "The radio chatter can become so confusing that it's like blaring rock music in your ears at full volume. You have to act fast, think continuously, pull upwards of 9 g's over and over, monitor your fuel state, track your weapons status, make adjustments to the jets' internal systems, avoid the ground, stay in formation with your wingmen, operate your fire-control radar, scan the airspace visually for threats, decipher your blaring radar-warning-receiver signals and ensure that you kill all the bad guys. Then you must dodge the SAMs, engage a ground target with live bombs successfully, turn around and fight your way back out through the regenerated Red Air one more time before heading home."
Simulated gun and missile shots are tracked by the controllers on the ground. When a target is killed, the deceased pilot receives a radio call telling him that he is dead. The pilot will often be sent to a location that simulates an enemy alert airfield, where he is "regenerated," simulating that the enemy has launched another aircraft. (The trainees go back to the base and land if they are killed.) When it comes to fighting Raptors, regeneration is an expected occurrence for WIC Red Teams. "We do everything we can to try and challenge them: We increase our total numbers, we regenerate, we electronically jam the environment. And we die," Brenton says. "We die wholesale. We are kill-removed repeatedly and then regenerated, and then we are killed again. The process would be demoralizing if we didn't maintain proper perspective. This is our job while we are here. What motivates us is the fact that we are training our brethren—and they are damn good at what they do."
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