Weather ‘curveballs’ fail to halt Red Flag exercise at Nellis
Despite thunderstorms that forced cancellation of Red Flag missions Tuesday and Wednesday, pilots of F-35 joint strike fighter jets and F-22 Raptors have made significant strides in the ongoing air combat exercise that ends Friday at Nellis Air Force Base.
“The weather has thrown us a couple curveballs,” Lt. Col. Chad Vaughn, F-35B commander of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211, told reporters Wednesday, media day for this year’s third Red Flag exercise and the first that integrated the fifth-generation fighter jets with stealthy B-2 Spirit bombers and many older F-16 and F-15 jets.
The exercise includes 91 military aircraft and about 2,600 personnel from the Air Force, Marines, Navy and Army, and pits high-tech jets against would-be adversaries on the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range before thunderstorms made the range too risky for air combat rehearsals.
“We see significantly higher kill ratios, both air-to-air and air-to-surface, and a significantly higher survivability rate in a very-contested environment,” said Vaughn, whose unit from Yuma, Arizona, brought 10 F-35B joint strike fighter jets to the Red Flag.
By working with air superiority Raptors, “we’ve been able to hit a lot of targets in areas that we would never have been able to get to before,” he said.
Lt. Col. Jon Snyder, commander of the 58th Fighter Squadron — a unit of F-35A Lightning IIs from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida — said the older jets with sensors and 360-degree view of the battlefield have proven their worth.
“By providing them good target locations and by providing them good threat awareness of what’s out there in the battlefield allows them to now operate a little bit more aggressively to move closer to those threats, and then bring all those weapons in that they are carrying and make them count,” Snyder said.
The next Red Flag exercise is scheduled for Aug. 14-25.
Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Follow @KeithRogers2 on Twitter.
