Exercise Red Flag, Nellis Air Force Base

The sprawling complex visible to your east is Nellis Air Force Base, home to one of the most consequential military training programs ever devised. It is called Exercise Red Flag, and its origin is a story about learning from catastrophic loss.

During the Vietnam War, American air forces suffered far heavier pilot casualties than anyone in the Pentagon had predicted. A postwar analysis known as Project Red Baron examined the loss records and found a consistent, sobering pattern: most pilots who were shot down were killed during their first ten combat missions. If a pilot survived those first ten engagements, his chances of completing a full combat tour increased dramatically. Experience, it turned out, was the most powerful survival tool available.

The problem was obvious: the Air Force could not send pilots into actual combat to get that experience before sending them into actual combat. The answer was to simulate it as realistically as possible before the shooting started.

Colonel Richard Suter, known by his callsign Moody, drove the concept through the military bureaucracy, persuading Tactical Air Command General Robert Dixon to adopt the program. On November twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-five, the first Red Flag exercise launched at Nellis. Pilots flew against dedicated adversary aircraft flown by instructors trained specifically in enemy tactics. The Nevada Test and Training Range, a vast restricted range to the north, on the scale of a small European country, provided room to run realistic multi-aircraft engagements.

Today Red Flag runs several times per year and includes aircrews from the Navy, Marines, Army, and dozens of allied nations. Participants routinely call it the most demanding training outside actual combat, which is exactly what its designers intended.