Train Virtually As You Fight
by U.S. Air Force Debora Henley 505th Command and Control Wing April 30,
2020
The 705th Combat Training Squadron (CTS), 505th Command and
Control Wing, home of Kirtland Air Force Base’s Distributed Mission
Operations Center (DMOC), hosts Virtual Flag which serves as a train
as you fight exercise by integrating the full spectrum of air, land,
surface, space, and cyber warfighters in a virtual battlespace in
joint and coalition environments. From December 2 to 12 in 2019, the
705th CTS hosted joint Exercise Virtual Flag (VF) 20-1 with its
mission partner, the 377th Air Base Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base,
New Mexico.
The exercise trained over 250 joint warfighters, and
accomplished over 3,100 joint training events using 60 different
systems connect at ten sites across the country.
 December 10, 2019 - Hosted by the 705th Combat Training Squadron at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico members of the US Air Force and US Army work side-by-side to refine their skils during exercise
Virtual Flag 20-1. (Image
created by USA Patriotism! from U.S. Air Force photos by Shelton Keel, 505th Command and Control Wing)
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Virtual Flag is a Commander, Air Combat Command
(COMACC)-sponsored exercise designed to provide operational and
tactical warfighters training in synthetic, theater-level, joint
combat environments. The primary focus of VF is command and control
spanning from the Combat Operations floor to the pilot/Joint
Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) in a realistic air environment,”
said Lt. Col. Angela Messing, commander, 705 CTS. “VF is designed to
prepare Combat Air Force (CAF) personnel in the mission execution
phase of composite force operations, and OPLAN fly out, in a joint
and coalition environment.”
The scenario is a major theater
war designed to focus on joint and multi-weapon system integration.
The primary focus areas are command and control, close air support,
and air operations in maritime surface warfare. Others include
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), integrated air
and missile defense, interdiction, airlift, special operations, and
space integration.
“Really what the Marine Corps gets out of this,
is the ability to work with Air Force, Army, and Navy all at the
same time in some type of theater of war, in a complex environment,
in a large scale evolution, which we cannot simulate that in the
real world,” said U.S. Marine Corps Captain Brian Easley. “So it
gives us the ability to work with all these different joint
agencies, figure out the best ways forward where there are holes in
our communication with each other, and move forward, then try to
apply that in the real world.”
Virtual Flag allows
warfighters to get the same experience they would get out of a real
flying exercise without using costly fuel and deployment time.
“We prepare warfighters for combat operations. Back home in
their simulator everything works great, but here we can insert that
chaos that they are going to face; tyranny of distance, how the
terrain affects their radar, how terrain affects their radios, we
can do communication jamming, JTIDS jamming, spoofing, all that sort
of stuff, that they are going face when we go fight with our
near-peer adversaries,” said Lt. Col. Messing.
“In order to
make our VF as realistic and relevant as possible to the warfighter,
we send teams out to the different theaters of operations to sit
down and talk with the planners regarding theater plans, and what
slivers of those we need to exercise in the synthetic environment,”
said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Linn Post, 705 CTS director of
operations. “For VF planning, we consider real-world events and “hot
spots” months in advance to give our participants a realistic look
and feel of what they may encounter or have to work through when
faced with these problem sets in combat.”
Aggressors from the
57th Adversary Tactics Group from Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada flew
constructive enemy forces from the DMOC to emulate robust,
integrated enemy tactics.
“This is a big command and control
exercise, so you get to exercise that part of it which is already
hard to do in a live, large force exercise with this being the
focus, this I think, makes the real-world engagements better and at
a much cheaper cost than having to expend you know hundreds of
aircraft getting them down to Nellis (AFB) and doing that,” said Lt
Col Nikita Belikov, “Red One” for VF 20-1, commander, 57th
Information Aggressor Squadron, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada “My
biggest takeaway is practicing that C2 (Command and Control) muscle
is not inconsequential and very, very important to those
engagements.”
Since its infancy, VF has improved to help
advance the modern warfighter. Based off the Mission Areas Working
Group presentations and the CSAF high-interest items briefed at the
CAF Weapons and Tactics conference (WEPTAC), the DMOC team will
build a scenarios to practice these complicated missions. As the
only venue in the Air Force to conduct Joint DMO training, VF has
become more of an OPLAN employment in recent years.
“VF’s goal
for the exercise scenarios is to find the “friction points” amongst
said plan that we are executing and allow the crews to work through
them, whether that is in mission planning through specific contracts
developed or real-time during the vulnerability period,” said Lt.
Col. Post. “VF, specifically the synthetic environment that we
operate in, allows the participants to plan together, make mistakes
(where no one is dying), debrief, figure out a better plan and then
re-run it to find a better tactic or process.”
The 705th
Combat Training Squadron (CTS), Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico is
part of the 505th Command and Control Wing (CCW), Hurlburt Field,
Florida, which shapes the way joint and coalition warfighters execute
command and control (C2) of multi-domain operations. The wing
provides a tactical advantage to the warfighter to achieve and
maintain C2 dominance in air, space, and cyberspace. VF 20-1
presented participants with a contemporary multi-domain threat where
exercise participants had to think through complicated problem sets,
including several that the Chief of Staff of the Air Force has
challenged the U.S. Air Force to address.
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