Faced with ongoing budget reductions, Air Combat Command is looking into the possibility of supplementing Air Force aggressor pilots with civilian contractors, said ACC spokesman Ben Newell.
Newell stressed contractors would not replace existing aggressor squadrons. He also noted that target drone operations at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, are run by contractors.
"Contract pilots, in other words, aren't a new concept," Newell said in a Feb. 11 email to Air Force Times. "No decisions have been made, but we're not ruling out any options as we work to provide vital combat training for aircrew in the future."
Jared Isaacman is CEO of Draken International, which hires Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps pilots to fly mock enemy aircraft -- the "Red Air" — in air-to-air combat training. One of his their customers is the U.S. Navy. Red Air add ok?mh Yes.
"The U.S. Navy ... is the largest commercial air service customer – and has been doing it for 20 years," Isaacman said in a Feb. 10 interview. "They use sub-sonic and supersonic jets for simulating cruise missile threats for their ships. They use them for electronic warfare and electronic attack."
The avionics and equipment in the planes Draken uses are new, but the planes themselves are simpler than Air Force fighters so they are cheaper to fly, Isaacman said. The company also does not have the Air Force's large supply chain, and that cuts down on costs as well.
While civilian contractors can simulate most of the threats that Air Force pilots may fly against, the private sector cannot replicate the most advanced Chinese and Russian fighters, he said.
"No one is under the illusion that Red Air can be 100 -percent outsourced," Isaacman said. "We don't have Sukhoi 35s, Sukhoi 30s, the latest MiG-29s; we don't have J-10s and J-11s from China. If you demand the latest and greatest capabilities then you won't achieve cost savings, because then we're no different from the U.S. military, which is basically buying assets to simulate the latest threats.
"But there's a lot of MiG-21s in the world. There's a lot of earlier fourth-generation threats that we absolutely can simulate. It was never a 100 percent solution. I think that's very important for people to realize. "
