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Air Force, Army step up joint training

The Air Force and Army are ramping up their joint predeployment training, bringing in a greater variety of aircraft, more command-and-control elements and sophisticated simulation capabilities that allow them to train more like they will fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Air Force pairs its Green Flag East and West exercises with brigade combat team rotations at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., and the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., respectively, so airmen and soldiers train together before they deploy.

What began almost two years ago as a large ground exercise with only limited Air Force involvement now more closely approximates the joint, interdependent fight being waged in the war zones, said Air Force Col. Thomas Webster, commander of the 57th Operations Group at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

“What we’re trying to do ... is get guys [prepared from] the Army perspective, from the ground airmen’s perspective, the tactical air control parties and air liaisons, and then from the fliers’ perspective, so when they get to the desert, [they’re] seeing exactly what” they saw in training, Webster said.

The Air Force launched its Green Flag exercises — an updated version of the old Air Warrior exercises — in October 2006 as predeployment training that would give pilots a taste of what it is like to fly close-air support and overwatch missions with friendly troops on the ground. Maintenance and support crews and battlefield airmen such as tactical air control parties also participate. Green Flag West is based out of Nellis, and Green Flag East is based out of Barksdale Air Force Base, La.

The exercises were modest at first, involving little more than 100 aircraft the first year. But since then, about 400 aircraft per year have participated.

Green Flag West, the larger of the two exercises, has “grown considerably, from ... what might have been a 15-sortie day ... type scenario to 60 or 70 sorties a day now,” Webster said.

But perhaps more important than the size of the events is the increasing sophistication.

The exercises now include more E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft so ground commanders can become familiar with the platform’s ability to track moving targets. The service recently began bringing in RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft and their sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities.

Green Flag also includes Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and fighter-based sensor platforms so ground troops experience a range of the airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities they will have access to in the theater.

The Air Force cannot include all its platforms in every exercise, and the flight window is only nine hours per day because of the limited number of aircraft and personnel, so Webster’s team at Nellis has begun turning to sophisticated simulations to fill the gaps.

The Air Force Synthetic Environment for Reconnaissance and Surveillance, or AFSERS, uses data gathered from UAVs or other sources to generate a simulated feed from other types of aircraft.

“Say I don’t have a JSTARS, but the brigade wants to work with moving target indications,” Webster explained. “I’ll configure the systems to do JSTARS stuff, and then if you have a convoy rolling down the road in real life, my simulated feedback into your ... terminal will look just like it came from a real JSTARS ... although there’s not an actual airplane flying.”

Webster said Green Flag already uses AFSERS to simulate full-motion video and moving target indicator feeds, and officials say they plan to begin using it to simulate signals intelligence feeds during the next year.

Airmen from Air Support Operations centers will also begin attending Green Flag East and West during the next year, Webster said, which will allow Army and Air Force command and control elements to practice their coordination before they deploy.

“We’ll start to develop some of those relationships in training before we ever go over to the desert,” he said, “which we all think is pretty crucial because we figure out how each other fights.”