Air warriors: (revamped flag exercises reflect new missions).

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. -- Gotham City lies in the Nevada desert about 50 miles north of Las Vegas' shimmering casinos. But it's not on any maps. Dozens of times every year, F-15 Eagles, F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Warthogs place simulated bombs on targets along its dusty streets. From above, the pilots participating in the legendary P, ed Flag exercise see a village resembling those they may encounter in Iraq. A closer look reveals that the town is merely a collection of strategically placed shipping containers painted to look like buildings.

Red Flag, one of the largest and most intense air combat training exercises in the world, is best known in the aviation world for air-to-air scenarios. In fact, an IMAX movie about the exercise, "Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag," playing at a casino a few miles away follows a day in the life of a young pilot as he flies against the base's aggressor squadrons. Like the typical cop who spends a 30-year career without ever discharging his service revolver, the chance of a modern day jet pilot engaging in a traditional dogfight is now remote, experts say.

And while toe-to-toe aerial battles are still part of Red Flag training, the leaders who run the month-long exercise about a half dozen times per year are quick to point out that they are adapting to new threats. Gotham City is a case in point.

"Anybody who has been to a flag more than five years ago, has not seen a flag like you're seeing now," said Air Force Lt. Col. Mike Caudle, deputy director of operations at the 414th combat training squadron, the formal designation for Red Flag.

In addition, the Air Force has revamped the Air Warrior exercise--where Air Force and Army ground troops coordinate close-air support--and redubbed it Green Flag. The new Green Flag will better prepare airmen and soldiers who are heading to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight insurgents operating on urban streets, in villages or mountainous terrain, rather than armies on a European plain, its managers said.

The changing nature of warfare prompted one Air Force officer to write an article, "Why Red Flag is Obsolete," in the September issue of Air & Space Power Journal, which is published by the Air Force.

The "fighter-centric" Red Flag "fails to teach and exercise a coherent strategy for defeating symmetric and asymmetric adversaries," wrote Lt. Col. Rob Spalding, an intelligence officer serving in the office of the secretary of defense.

He cited the use of Predator unmanned aerial vehicles as more suitable to fighting insurgents or terrorists, and its emergence as a favorite tool of combatant commanders.

"I can't help likening this to cavalry officers who looked for ways to preserve the horse in spite of the overwhelming evidence that tanks were the wave of the future," Spalding said.

Col. Steven Carey, commandant of the College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., offered an opposing viewpoint in the same issue. Red Flag is adapting, he noted, but it can't abandon its traditional role.

"To bury our heads in the sand and declare that large-scale conflict or scenarios obsolete would be a mistake," he wrote.

The debate is not unlike others continuing throughout the U.S. military. For which kinds of conflicts should the nation prepare? Large-scale wars against peers such as China or smaller conflicts waged against non-state actors such as Al Qaida? Or perhaps insurgencies such as those in Afghanistan and Iran? What kind of weapons systems, warfighters, training and tactics are needed? What balance must be struck?

"We're not only fighting the war today," Caudle said. "But we're looking five, 10, 20 years down the road at the emerging threats, and we train to that environment."

Red Flag, meanwhile, has not lost its reputation as an "aerial pressure cooker," as Carey put it. The exercise is said to be more intense for pilots than actual air combat.

It was first conceived during the Vietnam War, when fighter pilots were suffering heavy losses. The Air Force determined that most casualties occurred within the pilot's first 10 missions. Red Flag was created to simulate those first crucial sorties, so when a pilot flew into real combat for the first time, he had a much better chance of surviving.

Outside the Red Flag headquarters, as German PA-200 Tornadoes from Lechfeld Air Base, Germany, took off, Lt. Col. Craig Anfinsen, director of operations, explained a typical day.

At that moment, there were about 50 aircraft in the skies above Nevada, including the German Tornadoes, F-15s and F-16s painted blue or green flying as aggressors, and a NATO-manned airborne warning and control system (AWACS). F-16s were placing simulated bombs on targets at Gotham City.

The two-year-old site, formally known as the urban operations complex, is "growing every day," Anfinsen said. "We just keep expanding it. It's really good training. We can have aggressor vehicles on the ground running around in that town."

Preparations for a typical day begin the prior evening when a mission commander makes his battle plans and decides who goes after which targets. Pilots then receive air tasking orders based on the capabilities of their airplanes.

In total, 28 squadrons, including 140 aircraft and 3,000 personnel, took part in the August exercise. The 64th and 65th aggressor squadrons, permanently assigned to the base, flew F-15s and F-16s. The German and NATO aircraft were part of Red Flag's ongoing mission to coordinate with allies.

At the Nevada Test and Training Range north of Nellis, pilots can practice taking out 1,600 targets, including simulated surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, anti-aircraft artillery, enemy radar sites and communications jammers. Inert smoky rockets are fired at aircraft to simulate SAM attacks, Anfinsen said. They are used as visuals. "Nothing is really shooting at them," he added.

The ground war the pilots are supporting is played out on computer simulations.

On that day, pilots were engaging in electronic warfare to take out the enemy's command and control capabilities and disrupt their advance. "At this stage of the scenario, we basically stopped the enemy advance, and now we're starting to push them back," Anfinsen said.

Caudle said a relatively new initiative driven by recent conflicts has been "dynamic targeting," or the ability to put bombs on targets in a timely manner.

Doing so takes close coordination between the air operations center, joint surveillance and target attack radar system aircraft (JSTARS), AWACS and the jet fighters tasked to take out the so-called fleeting targets. The goal is "to try to cut that time down for the approval process," he said.

At the end of the day, pilots attend a debriefing where they learn from their mistakes.

"That is our goal here," Anfinsen said. "Not to punish them. Not to win. We're trying to teach them how to be better aviators, and how to work together."

Caudle said global positioning system jammers are among the real-world threats incorporated into the exercise during the last few years. The 57th Adversary Tactics Group was stood up in 2005 to mimic the kinds of defenses a nation state might throw up in an air battle.

A staff of 130, the white force, runs the exercise and assures safety. The 98th Range Wing builds targets like Gotham City. "They come up with great ideas to make things realistic up there," Caudle said. They paint windows, construct bunkers, stack the shipping containers to make them look like multi-story buildings, and litter the roads with abandoned vehicles. The mock city has grown to about 10 square miles, Candle said.

Anfinsen said, "Part of the goal here is to understand what each aircraft can do. What are their limitations?"

"How do I know what the German Tornado can do unless I fly with it?" he added. It's better to figure that out in Nevada rather than waiting for a real skirmish and a life-or-death situation, he added.

It will be a particularly interesting question when the first F-22 Raptors fly in Red Flag, which is tentatively scheduled for January, Anfinsen said. "How do all the other airframes operate with it?"

And while Red Flag employs simulated ground forces, about 150 miles to the southwest at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., the Green Flag exercise has real "boots on the ground." It serves as joint Air Force-Army brigade training for squadrons and troops being sent to Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom.

"Green Flag addresses the 'close fight,'" Air Force Lt. Col. John N. Harris, deputy commander of the joint air ground operations group, said via email. It's "that aspect of air operations conducted in close concert with ground forces. In that fight, aircrews must learn to contact, communicate and convey information with friendly forces in order to find, fix and eliminate enemy forces operating in close proximity."

An exercise formerly known as Green Flag, which concentrated on Air Force electronic warfare, was incorporated into Red Flag in 2000. There is no relation between the two other than the recycled name. The first exercise to use the new Green Flag designation took place in October.

By eliminating enemy air defenses, Harris said Red Flag practices "busting down the door," as coalition air forces did in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

Green Flag is what comes afterwards. Traditionally, that is using joint terminal air controllers, better known as JTACs, who accompany ground forces and help them put bombs on targets. But the insurgency has called for new scenarios.

"In today's environment it is also counter-improvised explosive device support, show of force employment--low fast fly-bys to show presence--and non-traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance--using attack aircraft to provide intel support to ground forces," Harris said.

Yale Yip DeLong, Green Flag program manager, said Air Warrior has been forced to evolve quickly during the past 18 months because of the changing nature of the war.

"In the past, we thought of it as dropping bombs close to the good guys. Now, it's a lot of other things [that] might not result in lethal" dose-air support, DeLong said. One example might be counter-mortar surveillance, where sensors aboard aircraft attempt to pinpoint a spot where an enemy is launching shells, he added.

Another scenario might be "point of origin," where an aircraft tracks an insurgent attempting to escape. Unmanned Predators are included in this type of training, DeLong said.

In Green Flag West, squadrons fly from Nellis to conduct air operations with troops at Fort Irwin. Green Flag East exercises originate from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., and fly over the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La. Simultaneously, air support operations squadrons deploy with Army brigades at both centers to participate in the ground aspects of the close fight, Harris said. Each location will host 10 exercises per year based on Army rotations into the two theaters.

Like Red Flag, Green Flag includes international partners. Squadrons from Singapore and the United Kingdom took part in exercises this fall, DeLong said.

Typically during a Green Flag, pilots are doing two turns per day--one in the morning and one in the afternoon, DeLong said. For the JTACs on the ground, it is a key part of their training requirement.

Candle said Red Flag does do some close-air-support training, but it is not the primary focus. JTACs do call in strikes at the Gotham City site on fleeting targets.

Usually these dose-air-support exercises are taking place in the southern part of the range as pilots and their commanders orchestrate a more traditional large force air-to-air combat to the north. These simultaneous exercises add to the "pressure cooker."

"That's one of the ways that Red Flag has evolved over the years. That kind of thing didn't used to exist at all," Caudle said.

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