U.S. Air Force Prepares Pilots For War With China and Russia

Air Force using new training center to 

prepare pilots for war with China and 

Russia

FEATUREDWIB AIR August 26, 2020 Staff Writer 0

Despite being the most powerful air force in the world, the USAF doesn’t always have the funds or aircraft to send pilots up to train against each other.

With potential near-peer conflicts with Russia and China always looming on the horizon, the USAF has come up with a new idea to train against such threats- giant simulation centers.

Enter the Virtual Test and Training Center, located at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. With several simulators packed in the 60,000-square-foot facility, the center will not only be able to carry out virtual combat exercises, but potentially interact with pilots training in real-life Red Flag exercises.

Maj. Gen. Chuck Corcoran, commander of the Air Force Warfare Center, said the center is a huge leap forward in preparing pilots to fight the top-tier OPFOR of the world.

“There’s no live training venue for the joint force — and certainly for the Air Force — that’s big enough or that has the threat density that can replicate what China or Russia can do,” Corcoran said. “So the live training venues … and testing venues we have, we have to do what we can on those, collect data, and then feed that into the virtual world and scale it to the size and scope we need.”

According to Business Insider, the facility will soon be loaded with simulators for aircraft such as the F-15E, F-22, F-35 and others.

 “Any conflict in the world could be simulated here,” said Lt. Col. Chris “Slam” Duncan, an F-35 operational test pilot and commander of Detachment 1, 29th Training Systems Squadron.

While Duncan knows the project is expensive, it is nowhere near the cost of keeping actual planes in the air.

“The bang for the buck far surpasses what we can do in live flying,” he said. “Just like anything, it’s a large initial investment to get to where we want, but … however many thousands of dollars those airplanes cost to fly per hour, you wouldn’t have that here.”

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