Nellis AFB hosting Red Flag military air exercises through Aug. 14

Nellis Air Force Base is hosting Red Flag exercises this week and next amid the pandemic — but this time with only U.S. aircraft involved.

Red Flag 20-3, which kicked off Monday and will run through Aug. 14, will see more than 80 aircraft depart the base twice a day and remain in the air for up to five hours. There may be night launches to allow air crews to train for nighttime combat operations.

“Our team built a great plan to keep our service members safe without compromising the rigorous training Red Flag is known for,” Col. William Reese, 414th Combat Training Squadron commander, said in a statement. “We know our enemies won’t call a ‘time-out’ for this pandemic, so we’ve focused on war-fighting integration and strengthened our partnership with our professional aggressor forces to ensure we are ready to defeat any threat.”

Red Flag planners have worked closely with the 99th Mission Support Group and 99th Medical Group to ensure exercise participants are aware of and adhere to local COVID-19 mitigation protocols, including hand and surface sanitation, mask-wearing and social distancing, both on and off duty.

The Red Flag exercise is organized at Nellis and hosted north of Las Vegas on the Nevada Test and Training Range — the U.S. Air Force’s premier military training area with more than 12,000 square miles of airspace and 2.9 million acres of land.

With 1,900 possible targets, realistic threat systems and an opposing enemy force, the range is a “peacetime battlefield, providing combat air forces with the ability to train to fight together, survive together and win together,” a base spokesman said in a news release.

Only US aircraft

During this Red Flag, the only participants will be from the U.S. Air Force, Navy and U.S. Marine Corps.

Since 1975, 29 other countries have joined the U.S. in these exercises, and several other countries have participated as observers.

The last Red Flag exercises were in March, when a service member from the NATO military alliance who was at Nellis Air Force Base tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Flight operations for Red Flag 20-2, which was scheduled to run March 6 through March 20, were stopped early, according to an email sent to Air Force personnel and obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal at the time.

Contact Briana Erickson at berickson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5244. Follow @ByBrianaE on Twitter.