F-35A to Red Flag

[durahawk]

Looks like the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings will be bringing the F-35A to Red Flag 17-1.

HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah -- Pilots and maintainers from the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings deployed the F-35A Lightning II to Nellis AFB, Nev., Jan. 20.

This is the first deployment to Red Flag for the F-35A and the first large movement since the Air Force declared the jet combat ready in August 2016.

Red Flag is the Air Force's premier air-to-air combat training exercise. Participants include both United States and allied nations' combat air forces. The exercise provides aircrews the experience of multiple, intensive air combat sorties in the safety of a training environment.

“Our Airmen are excited to bring the F-35 to a full-spectrum combat exercise,” said Col. David Lyons, 388th FW commander. “This battle space is going to be a great place to leverage our stealth and interoperability. It’s a lethal platform and I’m confident we will prove to be an invaluable asset to the commander.”

The jets will be at Red Flag through Feb. 10. While deployed, the F-35 will fly alongside fourth-and-fifth generation platforms and provide offensive and defensive counter air, suppression of enemy air defenses, and limited close air support.

“Red Flag is hands-down the best training in the world to ensure our Airmen are fully mission ready,” said Col. David Smith, 419th FW commander. “It’s as close to combat operations as you can get. Our Reserve pilots and maintainers are looking forward to putting the F-35A weapon system to the test alongside our active duty partners to bring an unprecedented combat capability.”

The F-35A is a fifth-generation multi-role stealth fighter designed to gather, fuse, and distribute more information than any other fighter in history.

The first operational F-35As arrived at Hill AFB in October 2015. The base will eventually be home to three operational F-35 fighter squadrons with a total of 78 aircraft by the end of 2019. The active duty 388th FW and Air Force Reserve 419th FW will fly and maintain the Air Force’s newest fighter aircraft in a Total Force partnership, which capitalizes on the strength of both components.
http://www.hill.af.mil/News/Article-Dis ... o-red-flag

[yeswepromise]

I'm sure they'll clean up shop just like the Green Knights did.

[spazsinbad]

A quote for the ages:

"...“Red Flag is hands-down the best training in the world to ensure our Airmen are fully mission ready,” said Col. David Smith, 419th FW commander. “It’s as close to combat operations as you can get...." "

[zerion]

Long article best read at source

RED FLAG 2017-1: THE USAF, RAAF AND THE RAF SHAPE CAPABILITIES FOR THE CONTESTED BATTLESPACE

Question: The USAF is the only force with more than 30 years of OPERATIONAL experience with stealth.

And with the F-22 and F-35, is the only force flying TWO stealth aircraft with fusion cockpits.

This means that you can focus on how the two operate together but also on the F-35 global fleet flying against F-22 in future Red Flags.

This provides the USAF and its joint and coalition partners with a huge training and operational advantage doesn’t it?

Col. Spain: We are already working on the F-22 and F-35 working together piece, but you have raised an interesting prospect with regard to the aggressor role.

http://www.sldinfo.com/red-flag-2017-1- ... ttlespace/

[spazsinbad]

Quote from 'zerion' SLDinfo article above:

"...To test the readiness of all warfighters, Red Flag employs realistic threat systems and an opposing enemy force that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world. The simulated battlefield allows combat air forces to train to fight together, with their cyber and ISR partners, in a peacetime environment, so they can survive and win together in combat situations.

Warfighters will also test the latest in targeting technology, Network Centric Collaborative Targeting, during Red Flag 17-1.

NCCT is the latest effort to ensure the ISR global portfolio delivers actionable data to decision-makers, airborne platforms and Air Force Distributed Common Ground Systems, said Garland Henderson, operational integration branch chief, 25th Air Force. This new technology will improve targeting capabilities through coordination of assets.

“NCCT theoretically shortens the amount of time needed to fix targeted emitters, fleeting targets and moving ground targets by simultaneously cueing airborne with other collection assets,” Henderson said. “Correlation of assets and cross-cueing of command and control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance data across multiple security domains is the main objective of NCCT.”

Formal testing of NCCT at Red Flag is the last step in ensuring this technology represents a highly visible and maturable Air Force ISR enabler within the Global Integrated ISR portfolio, Henderson added...."

[Dragon029]

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/milit ... -excercise

Posted February 2, 2017 - 6:15pm - Updated February 2, 2017 - 7:30pm
Controversial F-35A warplane struts its stuff in Red Flag excercise

By KEITH ROGERS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

While controversy trails the F-35A Lightning II fighter whenever it flies these days, only contrails were visible Thursday as the cutting-edge stealth jet made one of its first appearances in the ongoing Red Flag air combat exercise at Nellis Air Force Base.

Since the year’s first Red Flag began Jan. 23, the F-35A — the Air Force version of the $100 million joint strike fighter — has been flying for the first time in tandem with the nation’s other stealth air-superiority jet, the F-22 Raptor, and more than 80 other warplanes and support aircraft from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

So far, the Lightning II has racked up 110 missions in the exercise that ends Feb. 10 over the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range, north of the Las Vegas Valley.

The F-35 has been in the limelight since December, when then-President-elect Donald Trump criticized the cost of the Lockheed Martin aircraft as “out of control” in a series of tweets and said he had asked rival Boeing to “price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet” that could perform the same mission. Eight F-18 Hornets also were participating in Red Flag.


Before his squadron departed for Thursday’s war exercise, Lt. Col. George “Banzai” Watkins, commander of the F-35As from the 34th Fighter Squadron, declined to compare “apples and oranges” of the radar-evading joint strike fighters with the Navy’s non-stealthy F-18 Super Hornet.

But Watkins said the F-35 “has been living up to what it’s expected to do,” in the exercise.

Red Flag planners made sure that the 13 F-35s from Hill Air Force Base in Utah have had more aggressor jets than ever to counter and avoid simulated advanced missile strikes.

Meanwhile the F-35s on the friendly “blue team” have been successful in finding ground-based air defense sites with their high-tech sensors and taking them out with inert training bombs.

As of Thursday the F-35’s kill ratio with aggressor jets stood at 15-1, even though the F-35’s primary mission isn’t air-to-air combat, which typically is left up to the Raptor.

Watkins said he’s “never seen a Red Flag like this where they’ve put up as many advanced threats against us. If we didn’t suffer a few losses, it wouldn’t be challenging enough.”

Members of Congress who hold the Pentagon’s purse strings have been paying close attention to the debate over the cost of the F-35. The unit price of roughly $100 million apiece is expected to decrease to the $90 million range as more of the estimated 150 joint strike fighters are produced for the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Navy and allies.

Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nevada, a new member of the House Armed Services Committee, said she has an open mind on the president’s approach to reviewing the nation’s most expensive weapons system.

“The president and secretary of defense’s focus on tackling the cost of the F-35 is absolutely right,” she said in an email via her spokesman. “Costs are coming down, but I believe there are additional avenues available to continue to reduce what we’re paying for these aircraft.”

Watkins said the F-35A’s debut has demonstrated that the nation’s newest stealth jet provides an essential complement to the F-22s.

“They’re designed for air-to-air. We’re designed for the suppression of enemy air defense positions,” he said. “We can see the ground through the weather with our SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mapping radar to detect a threat and take it out before it’s a factor to the other aircraft out there.”

The Marine version — the F-35B — was the first joint strike fighter to fly in a Red Flag at Nellis, in July last year.

[popcorn]

15-1? Oh nooooo,,,

[hornetfinn]

Interesting video from Red Flag 17-1, participating aircraft taking off and landing. Shows nicely the difference between combat loaded 4th gen and 5th gen fighters. So besides F-22, F-35A, F-15C, F16C and CJ there are EA-18G, Eurofighter Typhoon FGR.4 and B-1B participating. Is there public info about Blue and Red Air composition?

What is the centerline pod in EF Typhoon? Is it Litening III pod?

[vanshilar]

15-1? Oh nooooo,,,

I bet if that 1 happened to be say an F-15, David Axe's next article will be "1970s F-15 beats F-35 at Red Flag".

[steve2267]

15-1? Oh nooooo,,,

I bet if that 1 happened to be say an F-15, David Axe's next article will be "1970s F-15 beats F-35 at Red Flag".

Worse still would be if it was a red air hornet: "1980's F/A-18, predecessor to the advanced Super Hornet, shoots down F-35 at Red Flag."

Quick... someone call 911! "911... what's your emergency?" Quick, I need you to get EMT's to Maus... he needs oxygen... he's probably into cardiac arrest by now...

[Dragon029]

Similar article, but with some more details:

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/red ... t-test-yet

Red Flag gives F-35A its toughest test yet

By: Valerie Insinna, February 3, 2017

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — What happens when the F-35A goes to its very first Red Flag, the Air Force’s premier air-to-air training exercise?

The answer, according to U.S. military and international participants, is that the event itself becomes more challenging than ever, with a greater number of more capable aggressors outfitted with advanced weaponry.

Although the Marine Corps operated its short takeoff, vertical landing variant in the event last year, Red Flag 17-1 marks the debut of the conventional F-35A operated by the Air Force. After almost two weeks, 13 joint strike fighters from Hill Air Force Base in Utah have flown 110 sorties, said Lt. Col. George Watkins, 34th Fighter Squadron commander.

“It’s a much more difficult adversary that we are fighting against here as a team than we would have fought against a year and a half ago, when I was here last,” Watkins said, referencing his previous Red Flag event, which he flew in as an F-16 pilot.

“They have stepped up the number of red air that we’re fighting — the number of aggressor aircraft that are fighting against us — the amount of jamming and stuff that they’re providing against us, the skill level of the adversary that they are trying to replicate, as well as the surface-to-air missile threat.”

Fifth-generation aggressors will not be introduced during this Red Flag, but the sheer number of fourth-generation adversaries have posed a problem for participants. Up to about 24 adversaries can be in flight at the same time and can regenerate three or four times after being shot down, Watkins said.

The F-35A’s kill ratio stands at 15 aggressors to 1 F-35 killed in action, but because Red Flag is a training exercise, the fighter shouldn’t have a perfect record, he contended.

“If we didn’t suffer a few loses, it wouldn’t be challenging enough, so we’d have to go back and redo it. So there are some threats out there that make it through because of their sheer numbers and the advanced threats that they’re shooting at us. So we have had one or two losses so far in our training,” he said. “That’s good for the pilots.”

Once the F-35 reaches full combat capability, it will be more lethal, Watkins pointed out. The fighter is currently limited to an internal missile loadout, but will be able to carry a full complement of weapons — including external stores — as early as 2018 in Block 3F.

For many pilots of other aircraft, the exercise was their first opportunity to fight alongside the joint strike fighter. Lt. Col. Charles Schuck, an F-22 pilot and commander of the 27th fighter squadron, agreed that this year’s Red Flag featured a larger number of skilled adversaries with advanced capabilities. But his squadron’s experience partnering with the Marine Corps’ F-35Bs last year helped them understand how the F-22 and F-35 could augment each other, he said.

“Getting to work with them gave us a little bit of an advance leg up this time to know what kind of questions to ask our Air Force F-35s so that our knowledge was there,” he said. “And it put us a little out in front in getting ready for the Red Flag, so we didn’t have to start from square one on the very first day.”

Lt. Col. Dave DeAngeles, an F-35A pilot who commands the reserve detachment at Hill AFB, said the mission-planning sessions were critical for understanding how to best utilize the unique capabilities of each asset to cooperatively defeat a threat.

“I'm able to sit with my [E/A-18 Growler] partners and just say: ‘How are you able to go and fight different threats, and how are you able to jam them?’ And I'm able to share: ‘This is how I would fight with my F-35,’ ” he said.

“Then, using the Link 16 network, we're able to kind of pass each other targets as well, so in certain scenarios where they say we need to take out a high-threat [surface-to-air missile] we'll work closely with the Growlers,” he said. While the E/A-18s suppress the threat by jamming and other electronic attacks, “we're able to go ahead and take it out."

The F-35 has particularly excelled in missions where the enemy can launch advanced surface-to-air missiles. Previously, in scenarios with those weapons, blue forces, or friendlies, would put all their energy into taking them out with standoff weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles.

"We'd have to start from that, and then we'd peel back from there,” Watkins said.

This year, Red Flag participants have encountered three or four different advanced surface-to-air-missiles in one scenario. In those situations, cyber, space and signals intelligence assets like the Rivet Joint partner with the F-35 to fuse together targeting information. Then, the F-22 uses its standoff weapons to bring down aggressors while the F-35’s stealth capabilities allow it to slip undetected within range of the missile system, where it drops munitions.

It would be too dangerous for a fourth-generation aircraft like an F-16 to get that close, Watkins said.

So at times, up to 24 aggressor aircraft in the air at the same time, and up to three or four different advanced SAMs to deal in at least one scenario, with the F-35's having "one or two losses" so far over 110 missions.

[charlielima223]

15 to 1 win loss rate... that seems very very close to what the F-22 can do.

[KamenRiderBlade]

15 to 1 while being in a handicapped setup ain't bad.

Plus they're still updating / learning / writing the text book on how to use the machine.

That's pretty damn good.

[bring_it_on]

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/508085/r ... -day-panel

[bojack_horseman]

Excellent performance.... hopefully we will hear more (and that of the other aircraft).

Oh, the dwellers are not going to like this