Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

by Tom Clancy

  The core unit is usually a combat wing. Each squadron from the core wing flies fifteen to twenty simulated combat missions during its two week training period. Supporting aircraft detachments (AWACS, tankers, jammers, etc.) make the training even more realistic. For twenty years, Red Flags have helped U.S. and allied combat aviators to prepare for war. The value of this training was proven in 1991, when aviators came back from missions over Iraq declaring, “It was just like Red Flag, except the Iraqis weren’t as good.”

  Green Flag is a special exercise that runs each year at Nellis. Green Flag might be called a Red Flag with “trons and teeth.” Instead of practice bombs, Green Flag uses real bombs. Instead of simulated jamming and electronic countermeasures, Green Flag exposes aircrews to the full spectrum of electronic nastiness that can appear above the modern battlefield. Green Flag’s only compromises with realism are that participants don’t shoot live ammunition or real missiles at fellow aviators, and no planes are allowed to crash and burn.

  Green Flags are very expensive, and difficult to set up. Vast amounts of weapons and decoys are expended during the simulated missions “up north.” It isn’t easy to assemble a force of scarce electronic warfare (EW) aircraft, such as the RC-135 Rivet Joints and the EC-130 Compass Calls, which are heavily committed to monitoring actual and potential crises around the world. Nevertheless, the USAF runs Green Flag each year to teach combat pilots how to operate in a full-scale electronic warfare environment. Green Flag is also an opportunity to test new tactics and equipment in a “near war” situation.

  For 1994, ACC decided to dedicate the third rotation period (known as Green Flag 94-3) to testing the capabilities of the 366th Wing and the composite wing concept. The exercise would include a full overseas-style deployment, complete with the construction of a field-style Air Operations Center in a tent city next to the Red Flag headquarters on the south end of the base. Could a composite wing really function in a bare-bones field deployment? Could other units plug in to the 366th Wing’s unique command and control structure? It would be a crucial test for the composite wing concept, and we were invited to observe the results. So in early April 1994, we headed west to join the 366th in their mock war, just outside the gambling capital of the country.

  GREEN FLAG 94-3—GUNFIGHTERS SUPREME

  When we joined the 366th Wing at Mountain Home AFB, General McCloud was already getting ready to head down to Nellis AFB. With several days to get acquainted with the wing and its people, it was not too tough to sense the collective anxiety over the coming Green Flag test. We spent most of the next several weeks with the wing, and what follows is a “war diary” of the high points. It was an unprecedented inside look at how a unit like the Gunfighters would go to war.

  Saturday, April 9, 1994

  We rose to a cold, rainy morning at Mountain Home AFB, and headed over to the 366th mobility office for processing. Instead of flying to Nellis AFB via commercial airliner (the standard procedure to save money as well as wear and tear on Air Force transports), the entire Wing would ride down on the FAST tankers of the 22nd ARS, just as if we were going to war; and we rode with them. The previous day, the first two FAST aircraft flew down to Nellis, taking with them an A package of eight F-15C Eagles, eight F-15E Strike Eagles, 8 F-16C Fighting Falcons, and four KC-135Rs. Since the new 34th BS with their B-1Bs were still getting organized, this trip would be fighters and tankers only. We were going to ride with about sixty members of the Gunfighters aboard FAST-3, the first aircraft to depart on this cold, wet morning.

  At the mobility office we stacked our bags in a large, open wooden crate, sat down to have a cup of coffee, and listened to the safety and mobility briefing. In a little while, it came time to board the aircraft and head off. Once we and our gear were loaded, the four CFM-56 engines were started, and we took off. Heading south, we were shown around the aircraft by the crew chief/boomer. We got a look out of the boomer’s position at the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, and a chance to “fly” the boom. Later, we went forward to learn about navigation from the attractive navigator, Captain Christine Brinkman. “Brink,” as she is called, might look like a high school cheer-leader, but she is one of two experienced female navigators in the 366th Wing. Nobody on our flight crew that day was as old as the airplane, which was manufactured by Boeing in FY-1960!

  After learning from Brink how to navigate by “shooting the sun” through a sextant in the aircraft’s ceiling, we sat back and enjoyed the relatively smooth, though noisy, ride of the venerable airplane. To help with the noise, the crew chief handed out little yellow foam earplugs. The cold inside the passenger compartment was another problem. We had been warned about the -135’s poor heating system, so each of us wore a leather jacket to ward off the chill. Less than two hours after takeoff, we turned into the Nellis AFB traffic pattern to land. A few minutes later we taxied up to the transit ramp and cranked up the cargo hatch to disembark our gear. We had exchanged the rainy weather of Idaho for an unseasonably warm spring in southern Nevada.

  The 366th Wing Air Operations Center (AOC), located adjacent to the Red Flag building at Nellis AFB. During Green Flag 94-3, the wing personnel in this tent city generated the Air Tasking Orders that were used by the Blue Forces. John D. Gresham

  Flocks of aircraft from units around the country were already arriving, and you could feel the excitement in the air. But the first job was to get the deployment team, ourselves included, bedded down for the duration of Green Flag. Though Nellis is a huge base, like so many others around the USAF, it is desperately short of temporary billeting quarters. Thus, most of the deployed personnel are billeted off base in a variety of hotel rooms and guest quarters in nearby Las Vegas. This housing arrangement is not considered a hardship by the aircrews, who eagerly headed off to collect rental cars from nearby McCarren Airport and claim their rooms. We stayed at a small hotel with the personnel of Lieutenant Colonel Clawson’s 391st FS. By sun-down, the Strike Eagle crews had staked out the swimming pool and were discussing the best places to eat and gamble. Since Nellis is only a day’s drive from Mountain Home, many of the aircrews’ wives and girlfriends had driven down to share two weeks of fun and sun in Las Vegas. This deployment was a real favorite among family members, even though it was going to be a busy two weeks.

  Sunday, April 10, 1994

  While most of us had a day to relax and rest, the personnel of Lieutenant Colonel “Tank” Miller’s Operational Support Squadron were working hard setting up the wing’s AOC in a small tent city in a side yard next to the Red Flag operations building, preparing the first of the Air Tasking Orders (ATOs). Even though the first missions of Green Flag 94-3 were not scheduled for two more days, the writing and cross-checking of ATOs needed to start at least seventy-two hours before they were actually executed. The Ops staff were working hard at their computer terminals to put together a Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List (JIPTL, the master list of bombing targets), as well as the Master Attack Plan for the entire exercise. Another vital document was the Air Coordination Order (ACO), which specified how the airspace around Nellis would be managed, or “deconflicted,” to minimize the risk of a midair collision or other unpleasant incident. All this planning was supervised by Lieutenant Colonel Rich Tedesco, a combat F-15/WSO with a gift for assembling all the details that go into making an ATO.

  An innovation that would be tried for the first time during Green Flag 94-3 was to pull all of the photo-intelligence data for the wing from the new U.S. SPACECOM Space Warfighting Center (SWC) at Falcon AFB, Colorado. The SWC would process photographs taken by surveillance satellites, as well as information from other space-based assets, and immediately feed them to the 366th AOC over a satellite data link located adjacent to the communications tent. The wing would have no manned photo-reconnaissance aircraft for the exercise. Since only a handful of tactical reconnaissance aircraft remain in service, this reliance on satellite imagery for strike planning is quite realistic. The AOC crew would work late into the nights that
were ahead, never really getting the rest they needed, but always reacting to the changes that are an inevitable part of the ATO building process.

  Monday, April 11, 1994

  While the last of the attached air units were arriving, the wing’s aircrews were either planning their first strike for the following day or taking guided tour flights over the Nellis ranges for familiarization with the terrain they would be flying over for the next two weeks.

  The starting lineup of players for this Green Flag was impressive:• 2-229th Attack Helicopter Regiment—Twelve AH-64A Apache and six OH-58C Kiowa helicopters from the U.S. Army’s 2-229th Attack Helicopter Regiment at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

  • 27th FW—Eight F-111F Aardvarks equipped with Pave Tack pods, and four EF-111A Ravens from the 27th FW at Cannon AFB, New Mexico.

  • 55th Wing—Two RC-135 Rivet Joint ELINT/SIGINT aircraft from the 55th Wing at Offut AFB near Omaha, Nebraska.

  • 57th Wing—Two Wild Weasel F-4G Phantoms from Nellis AFB’s own 561st FS, as well as two F-16Cs from the 422nd TES.

  • 187th FG, 160th FS—To augment the aggressor aircraft from the Adversary Tactics Division, eight F-16C Fighting Falcons from the Alabama ANG were tasked to act as additional threat aircraft.

  • 193rd Special Operations Group (SOG), 193rd Special Operations Squadron (SOS)—The Pennsylvania ANG contributed an EC-130 with the Senior Scout “clip-on” EW system, from the 193rd SOG at Harrisburg IAP.

  • 355th Wing—Two EC-130H Compass Call jamming aircraft from the 355th Wing at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona.

  • 388th FW—Ten F-16C Fighting Falcons equipped with LANTIRN pods from the 388th FW at Hill AFB, Utah.

  • 414th FS—Four F-16C Fighting Falcons from the Nellis AFB Adversary Tactics Division, to provide aggressor support.

  • 552nd ACW—Two E-3B Sentrys from the 552nd ACW at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma.

  By the time the last of the Green Flag participants had arrived, there were over two hundred aircraft on the ramp at Nellis AFB, quite an air force by itself.

  After their familiarization flights, the crews attended a series of safety briefings, designed to minimize the chance of what the crews call “a sudden violation of the air/ground interface”—in other words, a crash. Not so long ago, accidents were unpleasantly common at Nellis, with more than thirty deaths from over two dozen crashes in the worst year, 1981. Those were the days when the USAF crews were just learning to fly low-level, and the high accident rate was the price paid to gain mastery of operations “at five hundred feet at the speed of heat!” Today the range controllers are fanatical about safety, with minimum above-ground-level altitudes and separations between aircraft rigorously enforced. A wing commander back in the 1980s was cashiered for telling his aircrews to ignore these minimums.

  But the most fanatical care will not stop every bad thing from happening. Even before the exercise began, an Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopter went down in a snowstorm on a mountain while deploying from Fort Rucker, Alabama. The crew survived (thanks to the crash-absorbing structure of the Apache) and was picked up by an HH-60G Pave Hawk from the 66th RQS (their first “save” as it turned out). Still, it was not a good omen.

  The morning briefing was scheduled for 0630 (6:30 AM in civilian time), so everyone got to bed early.

  Tuesday, April 12, 1994—Day 1: Mission #1

  The mass briefing room in the Red Flag building was crowded to capacity for the first mission of Green Flag 94-3. The 366th would be playing the role of the good guys, the Blue force. The adversary F-16s (bad guys) would be the Red Force. The object of the game was for Blue to crush the more numerous Reds by smashing their ground targets and shooting down their planes, while avoiding Blue losses. Even though General McCloud was in command, the Red Flag staff actually runs the show. After the weather and safety briefings, the 366th staff came in to give the Blue Force mission briefing. Following this, at 0645, the pilots and controllers of the aircraft and emitters from the Adversary Tactics Department (the Red Force) left for their own briefing. In a few hours war would break out on the northern ranges of the Nellis complex.

  For the Red Force, the mission was simple: Stop the Blue Force. Today that would involve eight F-16Cs simulating the performance and tactics of the Russian MiG-29 Fulcrum. For the Blue Force, the first part of their plan was to strike at simulated enemy command facilities (bunkers) and strategic targets (SCUD launch sites). That would complete Phase I. In Phase II, Blue would gain air supremacy over Red by bombing airfields and SAM/AAA sites. Finally, in Phase III, Blue would bomb a variety of targets, mostly truck convoys and supply centers. The campaign was planned to last nine days, depending on the breaks of the referees and how well the bomb damage assessment (BDA) went.

  A squadron planning room for one of the 366th’s fighter units at Green Flag 94-3. The CTAPS mission-planning terminal is located in the pile of cases at the left. John D. Gresham

  The strike command would fall to the 366th Wing, though General McCloud would not personally lead the strike. A relative newcomer to his F-16, he swallowed his pride and flew as number six in a formation of six 389th FS F-16Cs assigned to hit a simulated SCUD site on the southern side of the event arena. Simultaneously, a quartet of 391st FS Strike Eagles were assigned to hit a nearby command bunker. On the northern side, the F-111Fs of the 27th FW and F-16Cs from the 388th FW would hit similar targets. The F-4Gs, EF-111As, an RC-135, and an EC-130 would provide EW and SEAD support, with two 22nd ARS KC-135Rs and an E-3C Sentry staying back to the eastern side of the range to support the Blue Force. In addition, a flight of U.S. Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopters would hit several Red Force radar sites, much as a joint Army/Air Force helicopter team (Task Force Normandy) did on the first night of Desert Storm. The big surprise of the Blue operation would be a new tactic devised by the Eagle drivers of the 366th. The Wild Boars of the 390th FS would form a virtual wall of Eagles to sweep enemy fighters from the path of the two strike forces. Netted together with their JTIDS data links and armed with simulated AIM-120 Slammers, they felt they could clear the skies ahead of the Blue Force with a minimum of losses.

  Takeoff was at 0830, and the air below Sunrise Mountain rumbled as sixty aircraft clawed their way into the air. First off were the E-3 and the tankers, followed by the relatively slow EW birds. Then came the fighters. Each of the 389th FS F-16Cs was loaded with an AIM-9 Sidewinder training round, two 370 gallon/1,423 liter fuel tanks, two Mk 84 2,000 lb./909.1 kg. bombs, and an ALQ-131 jamming pod. Their decoy launchers were fully loaded with chaff and flare rounds; and like all the aircraft of the strike force, they would use their jam-resistant Have Quick II radios to (hopefully) defeat the communications jammers of the adversary forces on the ground. Last off were the adversary F-16s of the 414th and the Alabama ANG, since they did not have any tanker support and fuel might be a bit tight for them. Up north at Indian Springs, the crews of the AH-64s launched from their forward operating base (FOB). Blue Force aircraft periodically refueled from the tankers to keep topped off. All they were waiting for now was the clearance from the range supervisor, and then they would listen for the “push” call from the air-to-air commander to start the run to the targets.

  Up in front, the eight F-15Cs of the 390th FS began their push towards the gaggle of eight adversary F-16Cs defending the airspace in front of the Red Force target array. Making careful use of AWACS data and their APG- 70 radars, the F-15Cs sorted out the targets, using the JTIDS links to assign a specific target F-16 to each Eagle. Then, on command, eight simulated AMRAAM shots were fired at the Red Force F-16s. Before they could react, the range controllers called seven of them “dead.” The seven headed back to the “regeneration box,” and the eighth fled west. The regeneration box is part penalty box and part safe haven located in the northwest corner of the range. If a dead adversary aircraft spends a few minutes in the box, the range controllers will resurrect or “regen” him, and allow the aircraft back into the fight. Since the U.S. Air Force trains to fight outnu
mbered against an enemy that can rapidly replace his losses, this is not so unrealistic.

  Unfortunately for the Red Force, by the time they had all hit the regen box, the strikers were on their way in to their targets, and the adversary F-16s could only hit back in ones and twos. The Red Force faced a losing battle, since the Eagles of the 390th were still on the hunt, and the Strike Eagles and Fighting Falcons of the Blue Force were hitting the incoming aggressors with well-aimed Slammer shots. By the time the aggressor aircraft were headed back to the regeneration box for the fourth time, the strike forces were over their targets, hitting them precisely as planned.

  For “Marshal” McCloud, this was the closest to war he had ever been, having just missed both Operations Just Cause and Desert Storm. Now he was “tail end Charlie” on day one of Green Flag 94-3, and things were going good. He stuck close to his element leader in the number-five F-16, and their ingress to the target area was textbook perfect. Six pilots set their weapons delivery computers for a “pop-up” attack, then pulled up, rolled, inverted, pulled through, and rolled wings level into a dive onto the simulated SCUD launch site. Lining up the “death dot” on the target, McCloud punched the release button, and when the computer was happy with the delivery parameters, the two Mk 84s were kicked off of the weapons racks. As he pulled out, he saw the explosions of two direct hits on the target, supremely satisfied at his first “combat” performance in the Viper. His element leader in number five had some sort of switchology problem, though, and his bombs did not drop. The pilot of the number-five Viper headed back to hit the target again, while General McCloud waited for him to return, orbiting nearby. Then suddenly, McCloud looked down and saw a Red Force F-16 chasing one of the Army AH-64As that was trying desperately to exit the target area after hitting a simulated radar site with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and rockets. Switching to BORE mode, he dove down on the aggressor aircraft, rapidly setting up a shot with a simulated AIM-120 AMRAAM. In a matter of seconds, he had the radar lock and fired a simulated Slammer at a range of 1 nn./ 1.8 km., a perfect “in-his-lips missile shot.” The range controllers immediately scored the Red F-16 dead, and as soon as McCloud’s number five returned, he egressed the target area (pilot talk for “leave” or “go away”) a high speed, hugging the contours of the mountains for cover to evade enemy SAMs and fighters.