Virtual Flag Taking Off
THE ANNUAL EXERCISE IS PROVIDING A VALUABLE SIMULATION EXPERIENCE FOR PILOTS.
This summer, hundreds of joint service personnel flew and fought through a range of modern combat scenarios assembled under “Virtual Flag 07-4.” The Virtual Flag exercises are coordinated by the United States Air Force Distributed Mission Operations Center (DMOC), 705th Combat Training Squadron (CTS), located at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., The 705th CTS falls under the 505th Command and Control Wing (CCW), located at Hurlburt Field, Fla. The 505th CCW, in turn, is subordinate to the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., and a member of Air Combat Command. CTS exercise participants describe the quarterly Virtual Flag exercises as “distributed theaterlevel mission rehearsal exercises, linking operational and tactical training audiences. The venue includes a robust theater campaign simulated by a virtual air-land-maritime- space-emitter training environment.
Emerging several years ago as an outgrowth of the earlier Desert Pivot event, Virtual Flag has grown to encompass the linkage of multiple simulator systems at more than a dozen sites. In 2006, for example, the four Virtual Flag exercises trained approximately 1,700 joint and coalition warfighters, across 26 weapons systems, from 61 distributed units. Planners note that the growth of joint service training has allowed the incorporation of critical operational lessons learned from recent combat operations. Moreover, in light of recent reductions and pending further squeeze on actual flying hours, some planners see Virtual Flag as a critical element in retaining and refining warfighter efficiency.
“The guys at the Distributed Mission Operations Center run Virtual Flag,” explained Captain Nathan Broshear, a public affairs officer at the 505th CCW.
Acknowledging a broad spectrum of responsibilities and activities conducted by the 505th, he added, “But our ‘core focus’ is command and control at the operational level of war.’”
VIRTUAL FLAG 07-4
According to Major Brynt “Woody” Query, Deputy for Operations at the 705th CTS, Virtual Flag 07-4 took place from July 16-19, 2007.
“A week prior to that we will have academics and kind of a fam[iliarization] day, which is a two-hour execution event,” Query explained. “Then over the weekend we bring the folks in here and let them do a little bit more mission planning.”
“Everyone pretty much gets their posteriors handed to them on the fam day,” he acknowledged. “They quickly realize that this is not a video game and they have to get back in there and really do some mission planning to treat this like the real world.”
He continued, “Then we’ll go into the four-day rage from the 16th to the 19th. And it’s standard, like Red Flag, in that they come in in the morning, they get the mass brief, go out to their various subsystems, do their internal brief up of crews—between each other and how people are going to interoperate, step into the box, rage for about three hours, come out, do your specialized debriefs and mass debriefs. Then we cap it all at the end of the day with an executive-level debrief between the boss and all the system leads at the distributed sites and here at the DMOC. We go through what worked, what didn’t work, where we might have let them down in training, and what we might need to fix before tomorrow to make sure that they are getting the training that they signed up for.”
With just over three weeks to go before the start of 07-4, Query noted that they were looking at “20+” distributed sites likely to join in the distributed mission operations, with a “wild guess” of between 300 and 400 likely participants at all sites.
“Those are going to be joint,” he said. “It’s not just U.S. Air Force. As a matter of fact we had more Army and Navy participation in the last exercise than we had Air Force.”
Offering one joint service example, Query explained, “The Army will do their ‘artillery fires’ piece in coordination with the joint services here. They’ll clear out a lane of fire. They will work with our Air Force CRCs [Control Reporting Cell] and ASOCs [Air Support Operations Center] to clear lanes of fire, making sure that we’re not sending A-10s and bombers and everything else through their artillery and ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile System] fires lanes.”
“So it’s all one, ‘no kidding joint’ theater level war taking place in cyberspace,” he said.
SIMULATORS
Query highlighted a few points of the broad spectrum of simulator systems either physically present or linked through cyberspace, noting the participation by an E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) simulator, an RC-135 Rivet Joint simulator and an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) simulator.
The AWACS simulator is run by Plexus, while the RC-135 simulator, located at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., is from Advanced Simulation Technology Inc. (ASTi).
“The MQ-1 is just kind of an ‘in-house put together device,’” Query said. “We took technology that was built at a modeling and simulation lab in Huntsville, Alabama. They had fly-out models for Predator, Global Hawk, Army MQ-1, Hunter, and a bunch of different UAVs. And we took all those and their databases—kind of government off-theshelf technology. For our particular purpose it’s great for training AOCs [Air Operations Centers]. But as far as training actual UAV pilots it’s not so great. But we’re working with them and they have a new system coming on line out at Creech [Air Force Base, Nev.] and we’re going to try to get them out here into the event with a full up crew at some point. It probably won’t be in 08-1 but we have their people coming to visit us and take a look at what we’re doing in Virtual Flag,” he said.
He continued, “Also, as far as bringing people out here, we get the intel-type/ observer-type person to give the real ‘no kidding’ calls that an AOC or any other organization that works with a UAV crew would hear. So we try to at least model the human element effectively. The imagery is pretty much the same and also the systems being used. It’s just the actual no-kidding joystick flying of it that is slightly different. And we want to do that better as we go down the road.”
Starting down a partial laundry list of participating simulators, Query highlighted two Control Reporting Cell simulators.“Those are the same boxes that you would see in theater. It’s a no-kidding system. We just tie in a computer simulation of what the TPS-75 radar would put into that,” he said. Virtual Flag 07-4 will also include two “Block 30” configuration F-16 Unit Training Devices (UTD) [L3 Communications Link Simulation and Training] that were moved to the Kirtland DMOC from Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico. “Cannon is closing down their F-16 unit so Air Combat Command provided those to us to see what we could do with them,” Query said. “And we’re going to work on getting some good training out of them. And we’re slated to get a couple more as we roll into the fall so hopefully we will be able to stand up a good four-ship capability here.”
“We also have four F-15C [simulators] on our floor. These are not the high-fidelity sims that you are seeing out there at units starting to come on line. We have a capability to have four F-15Cs or we can back-convert the touch screens—take the front plate off, put a new one on and re-program them in about half an hour—and we can have two F-15E two-seater cockpits,” he said.
“When you look at the panels there’s a bunch of silk-screened stuff on there, nothing with real switches and dials” he noted. “But we’re not training emergency procedures in these sims. We’re working on how they would fly out a theater combat mission.”
Virtual Flag 07-4 also featured a Cobra Ball emulator [simulating an Air Force airborne intelligence platform that carries a suite of electro-optical and infrared surveillance equipment on an RC-135.
“We have stood up an aggressor capability as well,” Query noted. “So, for the aggressor pilots out at Nellis, we are their only venue into DMO, as far as the flying portion goes.”
“We’re working at building that out here,” he added. “They’ve been in a couple of our events now and it’s been great. We have had an aggressor capability for a while but for the first time ever, in our last exercise, we actually had an aggressor pilot going up against the crews. And it was pretty good. It’s good to have them here. They lend a certain credibility to the aggressor situation and they were great helping us out with academics.” Query said that the aggressor participation was based on “an abandoned F- 16 sim” that was modified, for that particular event, into a MiG-23.
“We also have an Su-27 and a MiG-29 capability in the same sim,” he said. “And we’re working on building a second cockpit for that right now.”
He added that joint service participation is also fostered through the presence of systems like an Indirect Fire Forward Air Control Trainer (I-FACT) [FATS Inc.].
“It’s a great system,” he noted. “It provides kind of a first-person shooter kind of situation where someone on the ground spots enemy vehicles, convoy movements, or a dynamic/time sensitive target, can do range spotting, can sit there with his ‘toughbook’ and program in the ‘lat and long’ of where that target is, send out the ‘9-line’ [Close Air Support Briefing Form] up to the ASOC, up to the AOC, get it tasked out to somebody to get some immediate air support or artillery support as required.”
In addition, the Army Air Defense Artillery Fires Control Officer (ADAFCO) will also be working beside the Control Reporting Cell to coordinate fires of the Patriot Missile System.
“That’s so we won’t have any ‘blue on blue engagements’ that we had in the early days of Iraqi Freedom,” Query said. “This is a good lesson learned, that came out of Iraqi Freedom, that we need those ADAFCOs colocated with our Air Force folks. And we’re kind of applying those tactics, techniques and procedures and lessons learned in working together to build a better relationship, so we don’t have any more of those ‘blue on blue engagements,’ or at least minimize the opportunities for them.”
INCREASING INTEREST IN DMO
When asked whether Air Force cost-saving mandates for a reduction in flying hours could be offset through cyberspace events like Virtual Flag, Query and others declined making any comment on what might be considered by some to be a politically charged question.
Instead, choosing his words very carefully, Query offered, “Since I don’t do flying hour scheduling I can’t tell you 100 percent that it is reducing flying hours. I can tell you that there has been an increased desire to use DMO [Distributed Mission Operations] based on the already scheduled flying hours cuts.”
“I don’t determine what the flying hours are going to be. Air Combat Command does. The Air Force sits down and says, ‘Our flying hours budget is going to be this.’ We’re trying to build some new systems because our planes are getting old and we need some new systems. That’s just the bottom line,” he said.
He added, “[But] here’s something we’re looking at down the road. Flying hours are going to pretty much run out in the late- August early-September time frame. So we’ll still have another month to go in to the new fiscal year. So what are you going to do in that time frame?”
“So I see a lot of opportunities for DMO is that month of September to kind of make up for those lost flying hours,” he observed.
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES
Virtual Flag 08-1 is scheduled to take place Nov. 13-16, 2007, according to Air Force officials. In addition to the potential of the enhanced UAV participation during FY08 noted by Query, another simulation development highlighted by the 505th’s Captain Broshear that is likely to see future expansion was the recent unveiling of complementary “Warfighting Exercises.”
“Think of Virtual Flag like a big theater war, where everybody is fighting and there are 1,500 aircraft flying around,” he explained. “But let’s say that you are a Patriot Missile battery commander and you want to get some extra training for your guys. In that case, you don’t need all of that other activity going on at once. You might only need a few hundred square miles represented on your screens with various things happening—planes flying in, missiles coming at you, and things like that—to test your people.”
“So what they did was to also develop these smaller warfighting-focused events, where just a unit can come in—an F-15 unit or a Patriot unit—and they can just run their little part over and over and over,” he said.
“So, let’s say you are an F-15 guy,” he continued. “The idea is that you could do an exercise where you would practice a particular event; do it a couple of times in the simulator; and then go fly that afternoon. You couldn’t do that with a big theater level event where you have a lot of different players doing their thing. But, because they can just do it from their simulator at home, we can pump out the modeling and simulation to pop up on their simulator at Seymour Johnson [Air Force Base], Luke, Langley, or wherever they happen to be. Then that afternoon they go out to the flight line and go fly.” ♦