Col. Thomas Bergeson, the 1st Operations Group commander, said it was the largest exercise for him in 20 or so years. In one Northern Edge engagement, USAF and its sister services put more than 40 fighters in the air at once, as well as E-2C Hawkeye and E-3 AWACS aircraft.
To confront the F-22-led “Blue Air” collection, the joint force mustered its best “Red Air” threat—front-line F-15s, F-16s, and Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets. The F-22’s team blitzed the opposition with a favorable 241-to-two kill ratio. What’s more, the two lost aircraft were F-15Cs, not F-22s. The Raptors came through the engagements untouched.
In Red Flags, Bergeson said, “you have a great day if you lose only 10 percent of your forces.” The massively lopsided victory for the stealthy F-22-led force was unprecedented.
“They [the Red Air adversaries] couldn’t see us,” Tolliver said. This was true even when the opponents were assisted by AWACS. “And that’s what makes the F-22 special,” Tolliver went on. “I’m out there and I have weapons like an F-15C or an F-16, but ... I’m basically invisible to the other guy’s radar.”
The 241-to-two record was amassed over two weeks of air engagements. Tolliver noted that, in such battles, Red Air units were allowed to regenerate and return to the fight, but lost Blue forces could not. Even with such handicaps, in the largest single engagement, F-22-led forces claimed 83 enemies to one loss, after facing down an opposing force that had generated or regenerated 103 adversary fighters.
And what about the two losses?
“If you see numbers where you never have a loss, I don’t think you’re training to your full ability,” Tolliver said. “If you don’t, at some point, have that simulated loss, we’re not going to push ourselves to be as capable as we are.”
Lt. Col. Dirk Smith, commander of the 94th FS, said that these aircraft losses stemmed from the aggressiveness of pilots, which was a good thing.
“They wanted to fly to the merge, they wanted to show” what such a fighter package can do “when you’re highly outnumbered.” Such exercises are “the perfect place to learn that kind of lesson ... so that, when it comes to real bullets flying, they’ve learned that.”