F-35A at Red Flag 19-1

[sferrin]

Can the 40N6 even datalink to other assets?

IIRC SOC (Jane's analyst for Russian SAMs) said, on at least the first flight, a forward asset cued the missile at the end. I'll see if I can track it down.

[doge]

28:1!!
http://airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2 ... y-Buy.aspx

Retired Generals Press Congress to Fund More F-35s, Discourage “Legacy” Buy
5/1/2019—JOHN A. TIRPAK
​Congress should boost funding for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and ignore a Pentagon initiative to buy new “legacy” F-15EXs, according to a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees from 128 retired general and flag officers, including four former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The letter and signatories were organized by Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-35. A handful of former general officers, at least one of whom works as a consultant for Boeing, have recently penned op-ed articles supporting the F-15EX plan.

The April 30 letter asks that Congress “increase the procurement rate” of the F-35 in the fiscal 2020 defense budget, saying the fifth-generation fighter “ensures air advantage over emerging peer adversaries through cutting-edge technologies.” The general officers pushed for an increase of 24 F-35s in the Air Force and Marine Corps versus the numbers proposed in the 2020 budget request. Specifically, they want 60 F-35As for the USAF (12 more than requested) and 22 F-35Bs for the Marine Corps (12 more than requested), while continuing with the requested 20 F-35Cs for the Navy, for a total of 102 aircraft.

“This increase will reestablish the original F-35 production rates that in the past years have been tamped by sequestration-era budget caps resulting from the Budget Control Act,” the signatories wrote. “The US must start buying the F-35s in larger quantities to reach the minimum 50 percent of fifth generation fighters in the timeframe required to meet the emerging global threat.”

The writers noted that the F-35 is doing well in deployments and has racked up “a 28:1 kill ratio at recent Red Flag exercises in Nevada.” More than 380 F-35s are now flying with all three US services—the Navy recently having declared initial operational capability—and in 17 locations worldwide, the letter noted.

The F-35 is “our nation’s only fifth generation stealth aircraft in production,” and the writers urged Congress to increase the buy rate “to keep the F-35 ahead of our adversaries.”

As for the surprise addition of new F-15EXs in the 2020 Air Force budget request, the signers did not mention it by name, but said the DOD’s proposal to buy “a legacy, fourth-generation aircraft that has limited survivability in a high-end fight today and is equipped with decades-old technology” won’t work. “The fourth-generation airframe is simply unable to win against near-peer threats, which are the biggest concern” of the National Defense Strategy. Such aircraft have “little operational relevance in a near-peer conflict.”

Former Air Force Chiefs of Staff signing the letter included Gens. Merrill McPeak, Michael Ryan, John Jumper, and T. Michael Moseley. Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Thomas Hayward and former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos also signed. Of the 128 signers, 60 were former USAF general officers, including 17 that wore four stars. Twenty-five of the 128 were four-star flag officers from all services. By service, 60 were former USAF, 51 former Marine Corps, and 17 former Navy.

[Gums]

Salute!

I am glad some folks are speaking out concerning going cheap now and then paying big bucks later.

I know many of the folks - students, cohorts that I flew flew and some from professional correspondence. I was very surprised at some missing names, notably Ron Fogleman. He was really upset when the Clinton administration choked off on the F-22 buy. OTOH, he saved the C-17 program before he became CSAF.

Gums sends...

[doge]

I tried to search for articles on Red Flag 20. As far as I can find, only Italy has written a detailed piece on Red Flag 20 ! Thanks to Italy !
Aggressor Red Force seems to have been EA-18G and F-35B ( ). Wow! Very Scary Adversaries !!
https://www.aresdifesa.it/2020/03/13/re ... al-lavoro/ (Language is Italian. Tried using automatic translation of Chrome browser.)
Red Flag 20-1

Red Flag 20-1, electronic warfare at work
March 13, 2020
Who has not heard of the Red Flag, the extremely realistic exercise focused on air-to-air combat that has been held periodically in the American deserts since the times of the Cold War during which there were fears of waves of fighter planes with the red star to sail the skies of western Europe?
During the month of January, those who have been able to attend around the runways of Nellis (or, for the more fortunate, inside the large base) and have raised their eyes to the sky or long telephoto lenses to resume the planes take off and land at a frenetic pace in the midst of the imposing non-stop activity of the great exercise, he will have certainly noticed some peculiarities in the type of aircraft involved in the first exercise of the year, the Red Flag 20-1, but we will return shortly.
Instead, we imagine the various stages of the exercise during which the personnel inside the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) , the nerve center of the air campaign, must make important decisions to counter the Red Force, the opposition.

Blue vs Red
The Blue Cyber ​​Force, the "good guys", raised their level of security to defend the CAOC from attacks by the Red Aggressor Force, which in the intentions of the planners was tasked to attack, neutralize and steal information also through electronic attack .
The Red Flag 20-1 in fact, was focused on the cyber war while the 20-2, currently underway, has as its main theme the air-air combat with the participation, among others, of 6 F-35A and 6 F- 2000 of the Air Force and 10 Typhoons of the Spanish Air Force.
The Red Force, represented by the local 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, was supplemented for the occasion by a rate of Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning (Lightning is the RAF name of the Joint Strike Fighter) and by several Boeing F / A-18G Growler of the Royal Australian Air Force, supported by a pair of ISTAR aircraft Boeing E-7A Werdgetail.

The presence of specialized planes for electronic warfare such as the Growlers and the F-35Bs themselves in the role of electronic "vacuum cleaner", thanks to their powerful software, made the "reds" an extremely qualitative contribution and to the entire exercise.
The obscure 57th Information Aggressor Squadron who coordinated all the operations of his assets has the task of acquiring, knowing, teaching and replicating everything that has to do with Cyber ​​Space and electronic warfare. Understanding the opponent's threat and capabilities, the department has the opportunity to train the Blue Force in order to implement, test and practice defense strategies against this type of attack by representing existing and persistent threats in the days of the Red Flag, advanced or extremely sophisticated in the various world theaters.
The first days of the Red Flag 20-1 saw the 57th IAS committed to producing low-level threats, gradually intensified on a tactical level up to compromising the Blue Force's IT and structural network on a large scale.

The latter, by training gradually, thus had the opportunity to learn to defend itself by not being able to manage its own computer network as it was compromised and degraded at various levels.
Typically, Blue Forces are prepared to protect their networks from "cyber intruders"; this type of exercise pushes the blue departments to react in the most real way and as close as possible to contrast the forces that in a real scenario it is assumed to be the adversaries.
In fact, threats at almost the same level as the Blue Force's capabilities force the components not only to think, but above all to react because the "reds" aim to get everything they can from the electronic point of view and use it against the " blue " and of course eliminate the" key players from the game "in order to inhibit or completely delete the resources used by the latter.
In other words, strategists, airmen and pilots of the Blue Force have the opportunity to train themselves to understand how to achieve their objectives and how to manage the missions of their assets by carrying on the fight while someone is trying to turn off their computers and the related methods of communication.
Communication is essential as teams work to achieve goals, maximizing the learning experience.
Of course, for a correct management of a complex exercise like this and to achieve the objective that is gradually assigned through the planning of the most realistic scenarios possible, the planners of the two "teams" are in constant contact to adjust the daily missions to what emerged from those just concluded.
In practice, if a certain attack technique is not received and adequately opposed by the blue team, the red team will continue to apply it until the threat is fully managed and the full contrast by the former; only then will it pass, as in common video games, to the higher threat level.

The importance of Red Flag
The Red Flag, mainly focused on the air-to-air activity and the Green Flag, concentrated on the air-to-ground ones, offer, in conclusion, to the United States (USAF, USN, Marines) and the participating allied countries forces , a unique training opportunity to face real world conflicts together.
The Red Force does not simulate, does not follow a script written in advance, but is a real opponent, fierce and who forces to react.
The repetition until nausea of ​​certain exercises, exactly as a coach works with his sports team, instead of training exclusively to understand the next best move, produces an obvious benefit because what you have already tried many, many times will find in practice a reaction automatic; it will therefore be as effective as lethal. Doing it together with the allies, another goal of these large events and allows you to merge different ideas aimed at achieving a single purpose.
As we have already pointed out, the Red Flag is traditionally the main event in the world focused on air combat and serves as the basis for the cooperation and interoperability of the Allied air war, absolutely crucial for fighting and winning tomorrow's wars through a well-trained coalition and homogeneous. After being refined and improved for over 45 years, the mother of all drills with a large force employment (LFE), takes place on the vast Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) complex which includes a huge portion of southern Nevada . Most of the aircraft operate from Nellis AFB in the north of Las Vegas which continues to develop its statutory activity also in conjunction with a very large number of temporarily re-deployed aircraft.

Red Flag through time
The Red Flag was designed and organized starting from the lessons learned during the Vietnam War : if a crew survives the first 10 missions it is much more likely that it will survive the entire round of deployment in the combat area. Nowadays, air combat is becoming increasingly complexPilots will face advanced and complex threat scenarios that typically cannot be replicated in training. These scenarios obviously include threats brought by the ground and a robust and highly trained air force, supported and supported by complex electronic warfare tactics and more, with drones that are increasingly becoming part of every situation where a crew cannot arrive or is considered unspendable.

Cyber-warfare
Overall, the training offer produced at Nellis has evolved over the years to support, through the most realistic and complex training possible, the professional growth and readiness of the equipment available according to the scenarios that emerged on the world chessboard.
If cyber-warfare is now considered a threat to be taken absolutely seriously, electronics has also made it possible to implement new forms of virtual training to make even what cannot be realized in practice real. The real-virtual mix therefore offers pilots and ground staff a range of unmatched exercises.
Thus, a few times a year dozens of military planes and hundreds of airmen, ground and intelligence personnel travel to southern Nevada to attend the "Grail" of air combat training.
In the opening, we mentioned the themes of the Red Flag 20-1 and 20-2; each training campaign is in fact different from the previous one and from the one that will follow you.
In each exercise, in fact, both the scenario and the dimensions of it, the capabilities and safety problems of the forces present in the theater are uniquely customized . Even if the various Red Flags see the presence of the most diversified possible structures, foreign and American, it is the Air Force of the allied countries of the United States, numerically inferior, that obtain the greatest publicity and the greatest return in terms of training; in many cases they are more avant-garde in terms of new and challenging capabilities brought to Nellis, compared to many of the American departments that participate in them.

Red Flag 20-1
This view is exactly what we saw during Red Flag 20-1.
The Red Flag 20-1 was one of the least publicized "red flag" drills ever.
The official photos and videos of the event were sparse to say the least. The only foreign participants in flight were the Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force , two of America's closest allies and who are also customers of some of the flagship products of the star and strip industries.
Contrary to many other exercises, the 20-1 has been smaller in size, we would say almost intimate and more silent.
Cyber-Warfare, electronic warfare, are not capacities to show off to the four winds, moreover ; therefore, it is also understandable that the press offices of the individual area forces have been heavily buttoned and parks in providing details and information on what has been done and collected at the end.

Participants
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) brought its Super Hornet F / A-18F, EA-18G Growler electronic warplanes and 2 E-7 Wedgetail to Early Warning & Control.
The Royal Air Force has sent its Typhoon FGR4 to Nellis which, remember, represent the most advanced version of the European delta-canard and an aliquot of modern F-35B Lightning stealth fighters (the version with short take-off and vertical landing), supported by an Airbus Voyager MRTT tanker.
The USAF produced has an obviously impressive variety of aircraft, including the F-35A, F-16C, a pair of strategic B-1B Lancer bombers, the RC-135V electronic warplanes, an AWACS E-3G, some mysterious EC-130H Compass Calls, in addition to the HH-60G helicopters and a pair of HC-130J with SAR and CSAR tasks.
The aviation of navy has obviously flowed, given the theme of 20-1, an aliquot of its own EA-18G Growler .

RAAF - F / A-18F
RAAF - EA-18G
RAAF - E-7A Wedgetail
RAF - A330 Voyager MRTT tanker
RAF - Typhoon FGR4
RAF - F-35B
USAF 421st Fighter Squadron - F-35A
USAF 119th Fighter Squadron - F-16C
US Navy VAQ 135 - EA-18G
USAF 37th Bomb Squadron - B-1B
USAF 343rd Reconnaissance Squadron - RC-135V
USAF 41st Electronic Combat Squadron - EC-130H
USAF 960th Airborne Air Control Squadron - E-3G
USAF 66th Rescue Squadron - HH-60G
USAF 79th Rescue Squadron - HC-130J
USAF 64th Aggressor Squadron - F-16C / D
Draken International Aggressors- A-4K, L-159/39

The list makes us even more aware of how electronic warfare was the dominant theme of 20-1 , with the very interesting presence of the F-35 versions A (conventional) and B (STOVL) among the opposite "factions".
The F-35, moreover, in addition to its low observability and situational awareness capabilities , in fact has one of the most capable electronic warfare suites on the planet.
In closing, we want to remember that in the last days of the Red Flag 20-1, a specimen of Dassault Mirage F-1 recently acquired by the company Draken International arrived in Nellis, followed by two others in view of the Red Flag 20-2 to which they are participating in the structures of our Air Force.

Tunnel
A particular thanks to our correspondent Giovanni Clemente who with his photos allows us to admire aircraft that we will never see in our parts, besides noting how much the F-16 Aggressors have been painted in the colors of Su-57, Su-30SM, J-20.
© Editorial texts, Giovanni Clemente and Gianluca Conversi images - All Rights Reserved

J-20 and Su-57/Su-30 color's F-16 is flying ! coool
Red Flag 20-2
http://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/comuni ... -2020.aspx (Language is Italian. Tried using automatic translation of Chrome browser.)

RED FLAG 20-02 ENDED
MARCH 20 2020Fonte 51 ° Stormo - IstranaAuthor Major Marco Barone
The F 35, Eurofighter and CAEW aircraft took part in the largest aerial exercise organized by the USA

On Friday March 20, after two weeks of intense flying activity , the Red Flag , the most important aerial exercise organized by the United States in which the Air Force participated together with the forces , ended at the American air base in Nellis, Nevada. German and Spanish airlines.

This exercise was created with the aim of letting those taking part experience a training experience unique in the world, able to contribute in a highly realistic context to improving the readiness and integration between pilots of different assets and belonging to different countries. The scenario in fact foresees to contrast the enemy forces, the so-called aggressors, including the 57th WG F-16C aircraft, as well as surface-to-air systems and other support planes, integrated with the best American aviation assets. This is an exercise context defined not by chance "complex" due to the high number of aircraft taking part and the crisis scenario reproduced. For the Air Force it represented the most important training event of 2020, for the first time ever with three types of aircraft: the F-35 of the 32nd Wing, the Eurofighters of the 4th, 36th and 37th Wing and the CAEW of the 14th Wing of Pratica di Mare.

The Italian set-ups, in the two weeks of training, carried out about 200 flight hours in a training environment unique in the world , which allows you to make the most of the potential of the aircraft and weapon systems supplied. The three different Air Force aircraft, in addition to achieving important training returns in their typical field of employment, had the opportunity to interact with each other by consolidating joint deployment tactics and implementing the interoperability of legacy aircraftwith those of the fifth generation in a perspective of modern conception of air power. The Italian assets operated jointly in the various missions, in particular in the role of control and air escort, implementing the integration of heterogeneous assets of the Air Force in scenarios that cannot be replicated on national territory.

" It was an extraordinary training opportunity for the whole team of professionals who worked on this RED FLAG," said Colonel Luca Maineri , Head of the Exercise Support Team . " At the other side of the important back in operational terms, these occasions are an extraordinary proving ground for all the professionalism that the Air Force is able to express. I would like to emphasize that before we can operate here in America at such a distance from home, the Armed Force has once again been able to demonstrate its projection logistics capacity, thanks to which we are able to reach with personnel and means, in a very short time, any destination and be able to operate and train in every corner of the world exactly as if we were in Italy ".

The Italian F-35s, for the first time present at a Red Flag , carried out all the types of missions foreseen by the scenario of the exercise, with two formations of four aircraft used in both day and night missions. The pilots of the 32nd Stormo successfully completed heterogeneous air operations of the Escort, Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), Air Interdiction and Dynamic Targeting types .demonstrating how versatile, mature and equipped the aircraft are with a spectrum of operational capabilities that allow numerous and different missions to be carried out simultaneously and independently within the same flight. In particular, the Red Flag has enabled pilots to further consolidate this line of tactics typical of the fifth generation aircraft, operating with the 62 nd Fighter Squadron of Luke , in addition to strengthening the role of this aircraft as enabler in complex scenarios. The F-35, in fact, have proven to be fundamental for the fulfillment of the commander's intent , with a strong stand-off targeting ability and all-time against dynamic type objectivesTime Sensitive Target . (TST).

[optimist]

The Red Force, represented by the local 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, was supplemented for the occasion by a rate of Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning (Lightning is the RAF name of the Joint Strike Fighter) and by several Boeing F / A-18G Growler of the Royal Australian Air Force, supported by a pair of ISTAR aircraft Boeing E-7A Werdgetail.

The presence of specialized planes for electronic warfare such as the Growlers and the F-35Bs themselves in the role of electronic "vacuum cleaner", thanks to their powerful software, made the "reds" an extremely qualitative contribution and to the entire exercise.

It could have been worse. The Aussies could have had a P-8 there as well as the E-7's and growler.
I don't think they would be working out of training mode. So the local TV stations would still have a good picture.