Virtualized Air Force war games put Top Gun to shame

Posted 2015-03-17 12:05 by Grunt Report with 0 comments

Every year for the past four decades, the US Air Force and its NATO allies have staged a series of mock battles — dubbed Red Flag events — to provide soldiers with “real-world” experience before actually throwing them into active combat. But this year’s Red Flag marks a significant departure from its predecessors in that the 2015 exercise will be the first to virtually integrate warfighters from around the country using cutting-edge flight simulators.

Red Flag events are put on by the United States Air Force Warfare Center (USAFWC) and typically held at Nellis Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. This site provides 15,000 square miles — roughly half the size of Switzerland — of open airspace in which participants can operate.

However, real conflicts rarely happen within such a small area. That’s why the USAFWC is leveraging a network of connected flight simulators to virtually expand the theater of operations from 15,000 square miles to a whopping 1.3 million square miles. This integration allows for many more friendly troops (Blue Flags) to match up against enormous simulated enemy forces (Red Flags).

“The benefits to the warfighter of integrating ‘virtual’ into Red Flags are that it allows us to bring in more of the combat-realistic threat envelope, and we’re now able to maximize the air tasking order with the most amount of ‘Blue Forces’ in both the virtual and live sides of a joint air operations area that is 1,200 by 1,100 nautical miles, compared to the Nevada Test and Training Range which is about 100 by 100 nautical miles,” Lt. Col. Kenneth Voigt, 505th Test Squadron commander, said in a statement.

That’s not to say that everybody involved gets to fly (either physically or virtually). In fact, most of the remotely participating forces will be providing simulated ground surveillance and support for the planes that are actually above Nellis AFB, though there will also reportedly be a few virtual aerial assets in the mix.

Read the full article here.