The Origins of Red Flag

I had started this blog out as a way of sharing a lot of the interesting aviation history I come across in the course of my reading. I'm a bit attention-deficit when it comes to reading, I usually jump between numerous books at once as I've really never been able to read one book straight through then start another. The benefit of this little quirk of mine is that what I post in this blog can be quite varied. Most of the time as I'm reading, I'll put a little dog ear on pages that I think have good material for this blog and over time, you can guess that most of my aviation books have little dog ears in the lower corners. I'll have several possible topics rattling around in my head at any given time and then when I have the chance to sit down and start a post, it's just a matter of seeing which one topic I've been ruminating over comes easiest to type! The topic I had planned for today got postponed as I learned via my regular Twitter stream this morning that on this date thirty-five years ago the first Red Flag exercise was held at Nellis AFB, Nevada. I just happen to be currently reading Steve Davies' wonderfully engaging book Red Eagles: America's Secret MiGs and it details the origins of the now-famous combat aircraft exercise that is held several times a year at Nellis. 

This past weekend I had posted about those first secret MiGs that operated out of Area 51/Groom Lake. The operational exploitation of the MiGs was but one of the first steps taken by the US Air Force and the US Navy to reverse the sagging fortunes of US fighter pilots over the skies of Vietnam. In 1966 the Tactical Fighter Weapons Center (TFWC) was established at Nellis AFB as the leading school house of fighter tactics evaluation and training. One of the keys to the TFWC was making use of the 12,000 square miles of uninhabited desert terrain north of Nellis that gave in the words of Steve Davies "the playground for America's finest fighter pilots". One of the earliest projects based out of the TFWC was the "Red Baron" reports. Since 1966 the Department of Defense's Weapon Systems Evaluation Group had been collecting a wealth of information on every one of the 320 MiG encounters in Vietnam until July 1967 that involved either the McDonnell F-4 Phantom or the Vought F-8 Crusader. That exhaustive data set became Volume I of Red Baron. Volumes II and III analyzed another 259 MiG encounters by Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs as well as other US aircraft. That three-volume set of data became Red Baron I. In 1969, Red Baron II covered 625 MiG encounters from 1967 to the end of Operation Rolling Thunder at the end of 1968. Later, Red Baron III completed the comprehensive analysis of the air war. 

The Red Baron reports were incredibly detailed with interviews of crew members and pilots with questions to be answered such as "Where were you when you first saw the bogeys?" or "What altitudes and speeds were being used in setting up the engagement?". The bottom line of the Red Baron reports was quite simply that American fighter pilots in Vietnam were not familiar enough with fighting dissimilar aircraft- what was needed was DACT- Dissimilar Air Combat Training. Red Baron went even further, recommending that the USAF provide its fighter pilots with realistic enough training based on the detailed study of all of the MiG encounters in the classified reports. One recommendation was the use of actual enemy aircraft (which stemmed from the programs I posted about this weekend) or realistic substitutes. That recommendation led to the formation of the USAF Aggressors, units operating Northrop T-38 Talon trainers and F-5E Tiger II fighters as surrogates for enemy MiGs. The pilots of the Aggressors specialized in emulating Soviet tactics, even using their own organic GCI controllers. 

The first Aggressor squadron stood up at Nellis AFB in the summer of 1972, but some of the founders and proponents of the Aggressors wanted to push the training even further. While the first Aggressor squadrons were wildly successful to the point that two overseas Aggressor squadrons were established (one in the Philippines at Clark AB for PACAF and one at RAF Alconbury for USAFE), it was a well-known fact from the Red Baron reports that new fighter pilots in the skies over Vietnam had a disproportionately low life expectancy. Other USAF studies had shown that the majority of combat losses (even outside of Vietnam) occurred within a new pilot's first ten combat missions. Once getting the eleventh combat mission, a new pilot's survival chances quickly improved due to experience. The solution was an elegant one that dovetailed nicely with the mission of Nellis AFB, that of the Aggressors as well as the secret MiG force then based at Area 51/Groom Lake. Recreate the first ten combat missions for pilots in the training environment at Nellis AFB using not only the Aggressors and the MiGs, but also the air-to-ground ranges to improve the accuracy of strike aircraft crews. In May 1975, the Tactical Air Command commander, General Robert J. Dixon, gave his approval for the formation of Red Flag with the first exercises to be held in six months. 

In that hectic six months, the most realistic training environment was created at the weapons ranges north of Nellis AFB. Not only were there to be fighter and strike aircraft, but also electronic warfare aircraft, transports and tankers. Reconnaissance assets would participate. Captured Soviet radar systems and facsimilies were arrayed in the ranges along with an integrated missile and anti-aircraft gun defense system. Targets were laid out and finally, the Aggressors would play the part of enemy MiGs (eventually even the secret MiG force participated). Right on schedule, on 29 November 1975, Red Flag I took place with 37 aircraft, 561 personnel and a total of 552 sorties were flown.

Today's Red Flag is a three week exercise in which entire squadrons deploy with their maintenance and support personnel as if on a wartime deployment. The average Red Flag exercise will have around 100 aircraft with several thousand personnel. Units from all branches of the US military participate as well as Allied nations where an invitation to Red Flag is considered an honor and testament to a foreign unit's professionalism. Since that first Red Flag exercise thirty-five years ago today, it's estimated that over half-a-million personnel have been trained, over 300 types of aircraft have participated and well over thiry nations have participated. 

Source: Red Eagles: America's Secret MiGs by Steve Davies. Osprey Publishing, 2008, p24-37.

How A Top Secret Program Restored American Air Superiority

At the height of the Vietnam War, the skies were filled with technologically-advanced American aircraft from both the US Navy and the USAF, yet the air battles were a thread-bare echo of past glories in the 1950s skies over Korea's MiG Alley. By 1967 the Navy had a kill ratio of only 3.7 to 1 (3.7 MiG kills for every Navy fighter lost to a MiG) and the USAF was even worse, with a kill ratio of only 2.2 to 1. By comparison, at the end of the Korean War, the USAF pilots of the North American F-86 Sabre alone had a kill ratio of 10 to 1. While various studies and reports like the Navy's Ault Report offered many suggestions, the basic fact of the matter was that the art of dogfighting as a skill had been lost. In the USAF, for instance, the solution in the 1960s to an increasing accident rate in the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II was to simply ban air combat maneuvering training (ACM)- the accident rate fell, but legions of Air Force Phantom drivers entered the skies of Vietnam with little experience in knowing that their aircraft could and couldn't do in a dogfight with North Vietnamese MiGs. While a the solutions that eventually restored American supremacy in the skies are complex and beyond the scope of today's blog post, the foundations were being laid down in the black world in the latter half of the 1960s. 

The story begins on 16 August 1966 in the Middle East. Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained air bombardment of North Vietnam, had begun the year prior and would continue until 1968. Monir Radfa, an Iraqi Air Force captain, took off in his Mikoyan MiG-21F from Rashid AB outside of the Iraqi capital for what was supposed to be a local navigation exercise. Instead, he made a dash to the southwest at low level, intending to defect to Israel. The Jordanians failed to intercept him as he streaked low across their country, the RJAF's Hawker Hunters too slow at low level. Once over Israel, he lowered his landing gear and wagged his wings to two intercepting Israeli Mirage III fighters, signaling his intentions and was escorted to Hatzor AB and given asylum. With the MiG-21 being one of the most potent fighters in the Arab air forces that threatened Israel, they immediately set about flight testing the MiG-21 for over 100 hours over the next 12 months, learning its strengths and weaknesses and teaching the Mirage III pilots (the French delta was the main fighter of the IDF in those days) how to defeat the MiG in a dogfight. Initially hesitant to share its prize with the United States, Israel eventually concluded an agreement brokered by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to loan the MiG-21 to the US for study in exchange for being allowed to buy the F-4 Phantom II, the American front-line fighter of the day. At the time the Israelis had made several overtures to the Johnson Administration to purchase the Phantom, only to be rebuffed out of a fear by President Johnson of escalating matters in the Middle East. Now that the Israelis had leverage, the Phantoms would be on their way and the US would finally get to study its vaunted adversary in the skies of Vietnam up close. 

The MiG was disassembled and transported by a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy to the USAF's secret testing base at Groom Lake, Nevada (Area 51). Responsibility for evaluation of the MiG-21 was given to the USAF's Foreign Technology Division (FTD) that was part of the Air Force Systems Command based at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. AFSC assigned all of its programs with the code word prefix "HAVE". For example, the original stealth demonstrator aircraft that gave rise to the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk was code named "HAVE BLUE". In the case of the MiG-21 on loan from Israel, it was code named "HAVE DOUGHNUT". Two categories of flight testing were performed on the MiG- the first type concerned technical analysis- performance, flight envelope, engineering, structures, and so on. The second part of the tests were operational- the MiG would be flown in mock dogfights against US fighter aircraft. Because AFSC/FTD's emphasis was technical in nature, most of the HAVE DOUGHNUT flying concerned technical analysis. 

The first flight out of Groom Lake took place in January 1968 and continued until April of that year before the MiG was returned to Israel. For three intensive months, the MiG was flown in various profiles to determine how it could be detected by both radar and infrared systems, it flew against the bombers of the Strategic Air Command to see how well the bombers' systems could detect and counter it, and infrared signature tests were carried out using a specially-fitted T-39 Sabreliner that could mount the seeker heads of various missiles in the US inventory. Out of a total of 102 sorties flown as part of HAVE DOUGHNUT, 33 sorties were devoted to operational testing in mock dogfights with the USAF and 25 sorties were devoted to mock dogfights with the Navy. 

Not four months after the end of HAVE DOUGHNUT, two Syrian MiG-17Fs on a navigation exercise got lost and inadvertently landed at an Israeli air base. Acquisition of the MiG-17s was of high importance to the United States as the MiG-17, though slow and dated, was nimble and the main adversary type encountered in the skies of Vietnam. Though limited to subsonic performance, VNAF MiG-17s were flying circles around American fighter pilots leading to the dismal kill ratios I mentioned above. After testing by the Israelis, the two MiG-17s were then turned over to the United States for analysis. The first MiG-17 made its first US flight at Groom Lake in January 1969 with the code name HAVE DRILL. The second MiG-17 then flew in March of that year with the code name HAVE FERRY. Both programs wound down by June 1969 and the findings were shared with the Navy's new TOPGUN school that was established to reintroduce dogfighting skills to Navy pilots. In addition, the findings of HAVE DOUGHNUT, HAVE DRILL, and HAVE FERRY were shared with the instructors at the USAF's Fighter Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nevada, where they would go on to establish the Red Flag exercises. 

On 25 November 1969 a Cambodian Khmer Air Force pilot defected to South Vietnam in the Chinese copy of the MiG-17F, the Shenyang J-5. The USAF pilot who flew the MiG-17 in HAVE FERRY and HAVE DRILL, Col. Wendell Shawler, was tapped by the AFSC/FTD to go to South Vietnam and make several evaluation flights of the J-5 to establish that it had the same flight characteristics as the MiG-17. This short program of just five flights from Phu Cat AB in South Vietnam was code named HAVE PRIVILEGE. 

As a result of these four top secret exploitation programs, both USAF and Navy fighter tactics were changed and pilots were once again trained to exact as much capability and performance out of the aircraft as possible to win the dogfight. It wasn't until 1989 that a Pentagon official confirmed that in the 1981 combat of two US Navy F-14 Tomcats versus two Libyan Sukhoi Su-17 fighters over the Gulf of Sidra that the tactics used had been developed out of mock combat testing with US-operating Soviet fighters. Not long afterwards, HAVE DOUGHNUT, HAVE DRILL, HAVE FERRY, and HAVE PRIVILEGE were declassified. What didn't get mentioned was that a much bigger program succeeded those programs and would remain top secret for 20 years! But more on that program in a future blog post! 

Source: Red Eagles: America's Secret MiGs by Steve Davies. Osprey Publishing, 2008, p16-20.