HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. -- Lightning crashes, and fire shoots from the ground. Smoke fills the room as Dorothy and her companions shake with fear of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, until Toto pulls back the emerald green curtain to reveal a mere mortal operating a machine that creates the illusion of the ruler of Emerald City.
Much like the infamous man behind the image of the Wizard of Oz, the 505th Combat Training Squadron works behind a blue curtain as the creator and controller of a live, virtual and constructive world that takes Air Operation Centers and Air Force Forces staffs through a quest to sharpen their skills at planning, executing and controlling war and relief operation scenarios.
That live, virtual and constructive world is Blue Flag.
Blue Flag provides doctrinally-correct air, space, and cyberspace crisis action planning and command and control training for joint and coalition air components and operational-level headquarters in a constructive environment.
The exercise taking place July 21-28, marks Blue Flag’s 40th anniversary.
Throughout history, Blue Flag exercises have played a major role in preparing commands for various wars including the Gulf War, Operation Desert Shield and Humanitarian Operations.
These exercises attempt to duplicate theater conditions and procedures as closely as possible to the real world. The goal is to train commanders and staff officers so that, in a war emergency, they can immediately participate in directing an air war and make smart decisions during the critical first days of an engagement.
The construction of a virtual world such as Blue Flag is an extensive affair, said Lt. Col. Merrick Green, commander of the 505th Combat Training Squadron. There are five divisions in an Air Operations Center who collaborate to produce this event which are: combat plans, combat operations, strategy; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and air mobility.
“I like to equate it to Voltron,” Green said. “Voltron: Defender of the Universe, an American animated television character, is a giant robot formed by five pilots fusing their smaller separate robots together.”
Combat plans develops the operation and combat operations executes the plan, meanwhile intelligence supports these divisions during the exercise. Strategy ensures the plan of the joint force air component commander, leader of the AOC and AFFOR staff, is executed. The final component is the air mobility division who determine how supplies and manpower is utilized and delivered.
“This is why it is so complex when you talk about having a Blue Flag,” said Green. “It takes up to a year to plan and executes in 7 to 10 days.”
Once the exercise launches, the 505th CTS operates a 24-hour battle rhythm to ensure the scenario is meeting the training audience requirements. Green describes this time as the calm before the storm.
“Everyone is calm and focused when the exercise first kicks off but chaos soon ensues after the first day or two as the training audience goes through the scenario,” Green said. “There will always be road blocks and hiccups but after a couple of days the training audience gets their battle rhythm.”
While a scenario is playing out, anything the 505th CTS or the JFACC wants to change to challenge the audience is possible at the click of a button.
“A lot of the times we operate in an environment where we’re the Air Force so everything is going to go our way – no planes are going to get shot down, nothing’s going to break – but in a constructive scenario [we] can stress a training audience with some of those artificial realities,” Green said. “So just when you thought plan Combat Air Patrols (CAPS) with a squadron of F-22’s we can insert a scenario event to remove the stealth fighters are no longer part of the air plan, what do you do?”
At the end of an exercise the 505th CTS and the participating AOC debrief so organizations can take the lessons learned and apply them to internal training. The 505th Command and Control Wing is currently in development of a six month newsletter to educate other AOC’s that did not participate in the exercise.
“Completion of one of these events, knowing we did all we could to prepare the war fighter for the mission at hand, is one of the highest feelings of job satisfaction we achieve throughout the year,” said Todd Nusbaum Senior Modeling and Simulations Analyst of the 505th CTS. “Distributing the information to the training audience at their actual location is an added bonus [because] they are able to work on the actual systems that they would be using if they were called upon during a crisis.”
As for the future of Blue Flag, Green develops the program with the three components of air power, agility, flexibility and teamwork, in mind. These components are believed to build a successful foundation for missions if used in correlation to each other. Green said that by adapting the program to be more tailorable and scaleable the AOC’s will be better trained across the Air Force forces.
“If flexibility is the key to air power it definitely is the key for the Blue Flag,” Green said.