who costed out Horner’s options and helped him work out where to find the equipment and personnel to build this force. Together, they put together a package that recommended taking a small number of excess pilots, training them in T-38s (later F-5s), and assigning them to Nellis to form an initial Aggressor squadron. They further identified the source of money for the squadron and the types of training they would accomplish. The Aggressors, like the Navy’s Top Gun School in Miramar, California, would do air-to-air training, but they wouldn’t do it only at one base, but would visit each fighter wing and give training over a two-week period.
By late that same Wednesday night, Horner had a package and a staff summary sheet ready to do battle for coordination. The next day, he took on the Pentagon. Horner and Jim Mirehouse, a Mafia lieutenant colonel who had flown Weasels with Horner, steered a tortuous course though the bosses and got the package coordinated through the variously reluctant offices. For instance, when the head of Air Force Programs, a lieutenant general, refused to sign off on the coordination, they waited until he went to lunch, so his deputy, a major general who despised him, could sign off on the package. There were other similar but lesser battles.
By 11:00 P.M. on Thursday, Horner had the package coordinated and delivered to the Chief of Staff ’s office; and the next morning, Momyer paid his visit. Afterward, the package was ready for pickup at the chief ’s front office. Attached to it was a two-inch-square piece of paper that said simply, “Do it. R.”
The Air Force Chief of Staff had given the go-ahead for the Aggressors, despite his SAC prejudices. Later, when Horner appeared before General Hill so the general could program the aircraft into Nellis and authorize the money to man and operate the squadron, Hill flew into a towering rage. And yet, for all his shouts, he could not ignore that two-inch-square slip of paper that said, “Do it. R.”
And so the Aggressors were born. It was a hugely successful program — as evidenced, for example, by the exchange ratios in Desert Storm.
RED FLAG
Red Flag came next. A vast scale-simulated combat exercise, based at Nellis and “fought” against Aggressors, it was primarily the creation of Moody Suter, a captain when he was at Nellis, and a major at the Pentagon. Suter, cocksure, irreverent, and boundlessly creative, had the face of a hunting hound, an overactive, not always orderly mind, and a brash confidence that never endeared him to the Air Force brass. Though all of his ideas were brilliant, many were too radical to be implemented. Either way, he worked and worried his ideas until they came to fruition… or else so enraged the senior leadership in the Air Force that he had to go into hiding until things calmed down.[21]
While Horner was still at Nellis, General Taylor had instigated a major study that envisaged an enormous training area using the combined Hill AFB and Nellis ranges. This area would include the airspace over the government land comprising half of the state of Utah and Nevada — enough room for a great many aircraft to maneuver with no interference from civilian airliners; enough room, also, to practice air refueling. The area would be open to supersonic flight and unrestricted military operations, from the ground up. It would have extensive radar coverage, including AWACS, so that pilots could debrief what went on during the simulated combat exercises. Live bombs would be dropped and missiles would be fired. There would be simulated SAM and AAA in the ground in the target areas. And the Aggressors who were not on the road giving training would be used to create an enemy air force.
After Horner left Nellis, Suter continued to work this program hard, developing the concept in operational details beyond the original engineering study. Later, in 1972, when Suter came to the Pentagon, Bill Kirk had him assigned to his office, and Suter brought this concept with him.
In October 1973, a new commander came to TAC, another SAC general named Bob Dixon, who was known as the Tidewater Alligator for his habit of tearing flesh from colonels and generals under his command (and from anyone else, for that matter; he was famous for indiscriminate hatred). Dixon had been in the Pentagon for years and was savvy about how to play the game there, and he was not about to let wild visionaries from Nellis sell him a pig with wings.
Before Suter and the others on the team wanted to take on Dixon, they built briefings aimed at selling the concept to the air staff. These came out of some telling creative analysis: At Korat and Ta Khli, the practice had been to give new pilots ten missions in the less dangerous southern parts of North Vietnam (in Route Packages I and II), where there were only a few SAMs and no MiGs. After gaining experience in those ten missions, they were ready to go “downtown”—to Route Package V, VI A, or VI B, which was Hanoi and its adjacent areas. When building the new Red Flag briefing team, the team used this experience to build a graph that showed loss rates and numbers of missions flown. What this graph said, in effect, was that the first ten missions a pilot flew were his most dangerous, and that if he could survive this without getting shot down, then his chance of survival significantly increased. “Why not give him the first ten combat missions over the Nellis-Hill ranges,” the briefing went on to say, “where he can survive his mistakes and learn from his errors before the bullets and SAMs are real?”
Red Flag was taking shape conceptually. Meanwhile, however, it was running into bureaucratic problems. Though the Fighter Mafia had tried to push the idea up the chain at TAC, the support of colonels and generals leery of Dixon’s temper was conspicuously absent.
It was time to pitch the concept to General Dixon. The job was to show him how this could be
At that point Moody Suter devised a scheme, which offered itself when the team received word that the Army’s chief scientist was interested in battle lab training and emulation of combat to test Army systems. In other words, he was thinking about a land-warfare equivalent of what was becoming the Red Flag concept. (In time, the Army made this happen, with great success, at Fort Irwin in California.) Suter then slipped word to the scientist that the Air Force had been working on the exact concept he had in mind, and was busy developing a realistic training environment in the Nellis complex that would also be used for operational testing. Naturally, the scientist was very interested in learning more about the specifics of the Air Force program, and so he asked for a formal briefing. In point of fact, at that time they had no program, just a bare-bones concept that needed meat and structure. What they needed were slides, the chief props of a military briefing.
In due course, some graphics people who were also in the basement of the Pentagon began working with Suter and Horner to produce slides for the Army briefing. On the title slide, the head of the graphics section sketched a plain red flag, then used the logo on the subsequent slides. The “Red Flag” stuck, and so the program was named.
Now came the payoff to Suter’s scheme: since Bill Kirk’s team was going outside the Air Force to brief the Army, and since Nellis was owned by TAC (i.e., General Dixon), it was their duty to let General Dixon know what they were doing. This message implied much more than was stated: With the Army’s “interest” in the proposed Red Flag program at Nellis came the implicit threat that the Army would want to start using Nellis for their own battle lab, which could then grow to the Army owning the base.
The result — and the whole point of the scheme — was that Dixon asked to hear the briefing.
Suter put on his armor and took him on. Ferocious, but no fool, Dixon clearly saw the merits of Red Flag. After the briefing, he told Suter simply, “I’ve got it.” Red Flag was airborne.
In its early days, Red Flag had predictable problems — too many crashes, for instance. In time, however, everyone learned, the training setup grew more realistic, and the young pilots realized they couldn’t take chances in combat. The safety record improved. It wasn’t long before the Red Flag loss rate was lower than that of the normal home station training.
Over the years, range instrumentation also improved, and the Air Force started to look at the integration of tactics and new equipment. They discovered how to configure a strike package of bombers, fighter-bombers, escorting fighters, rescue forces, Wild Weasels, and command and control, which included AWACS, Rivet Joint (an EC-135 aircraft that collected signals intelligence—“sigint”), and Compass Call (an EC-130 aircraft that not only collected sigint, but also jammed enemy signals between aircraft, their ground controllers, and their ground radar network).
In time, Red Flag also began to involve integrated flying operations with Navy and Marine aircraft and with foreign air forces — French, British, Korean, Saudi, Israeli, and German. Air Guard and Reserves also flew in Red Flag, so that in the future, whenever a task force of USAF and non-USAF fliers were brought together (whether in
