The maneuver plays out like an aerial ballet at 280 knots and 20,000 feet over the Nevada desert.
A US Marines F-35b Lightning warplane slips its refueling probe from a nozzle towed by a Royal Air Force tanker and slides away, forming up with two more American planes, as an Australian electronic warfare jet takes its place.
As the Royal Australian Air Force Growler guzzles down 5000lb of fuel, the three F-35s soar into the sky, climbing high above the tanker before banking hard left and accelerating into the sun.
They are crammed with all the latest fighting technology, so secret that DailyMail.com is later told it cannot publish pictures of the American jets.
Welcome to Exercise Red Flag, an annual simulation where U.S., British, and Australian pilots practise fighting together.
It has run for decades, adapting and evolving to represent changing global dangers. Today the buzzword is ‘pacing threats’—powers that could knock the U.S. from its perch but that do not represent an immediate military threat.
Think China or Russia.
And if that wasn’t a clear enough hint about the enemy’s identity, Operation Bamboo Eagle follows, moving the action out across the eastern Pacific. It adds what planners call the ‘tyranny of distance,’ simulating the difficulty of fighting a long way from home.
Two Australian and one American E-18 Growler electronic warface aircraft in the air over Nevada. They are flying off the wing of an RAF Voyager tanker as they prepare to refuel
An RAF Typhoon Eurofighter completes its maneuvers and latches on to a refueling hose. It is all part of Operation Red Flag, a two-week advanced training exercise for the U.S. and its allies
Red Flag commander Col. Eric Winterbottom: ‘We win future conflicts as a coalition’
‘For a lot of my career, Red Flag was focused on a desert theater. Now we’re transitioning to a pacing threat,’ said Col. Eric Winterbottom, commander of the 414th Combat Training Squadron which represents the ‘enemy.’
‘We are presenting very high-end capabilities that rival our own, giving our folks the opportunity to integrate to defeat those threats.
Where once it might have focused on training to take on an insurgency in Afghanistan or Iraq, now it is all about what strategists call ‘great power competition.’ Instead of Taliban gunmen in caves, imagine huge Chinese aircraft carriers or their latest fighter jets.
Red Flag has operated since 1975, born out of a realization that pilots were simply not combat ready when they took to the skies of Vietnam. At times, the world’s most powerful air force was losing more planes than the Northern Vietnamese.
The result was an exercise designed to be more realistic than ever before.
Winterbottom’s crack U.S. pilots fly mostly F-16s. Their job is to represent the red forces.
Up against them, the Brits, Aussies and Americans of the blue forces are tasked with first pushing back the red air forces and carving out air space for the next phase.
‘They also have to push back the enemy surface to air missiles through our suppression of enemy air defense role,’ he said.
RAF Typhoons lined up at Nellis Air Force Base ready for the battles ahead
Red Flag has been held annually since 1975. The U.S. Air Force suffered heavy losses during the Vietnam war, and senior officers decided air crews needed more realistic combat training
Enemy red forces included F-16 Falcons of the Aggressor Squadron, headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and made up of highly experienced pilots
Fl. Lt. Calum Falconer is one of the RAF Typhoon pilots flying in the exercise
‘And then we’ll have strikers go in, and those strikers will either be bombing pre-planned targets, along with dynamic targets, which in our scenario present a moving target, typically that will move somewhere and then stop.’
All of that happens over hundreds and hundred of miles. That is where the RAF Voyager and its tons of aviation fuel comes in.
It banks left and left and left as it stays in position outside the battle space, far from the hostile red forces, but close enough for its more than 120,000 lb of fuel to keep the blue fighters in the battle.
The voyager is based on the Airbus A330, but has a different set of wings to accommodate extra fuel tanks and the refuelling system.
It can stay in the air for as long as 12 hours if it needs to.
Fl. Lt Jason Alty, the plane’s captain, is waiting for a pair of RAF Typhoons to rendezvous.
‘Once refuelling is complete, then they can stay in the fight to the very end,’ he said.
Behind him, a colleague is watching a bank of monitors which he uses to guide in the thirsty warplanes.
From left to right: Capt. Stewart Seeney of the Royal Australian Air Force, Col. Eric Winterbottom of the United States Air Force, and Gp. Capt. Guy Lefroy of the Royal Air Force
The RAF contingent includes a Voyager tanker, from where passengers can watch midair refuelling from hoses deployed from either wing
Flt. Lt. Jason Alty at the controls of the RAF Voyager tanker at 20,000 ft over Nevada
It is Master Aircrew John Clifford’s job to guide in ‘receivers,’ the jets waiting to refuel, to the hoses deployed off each wing of the Voyager
Aboard the Voyager, which is based on an Airbus A330 passenger jet
Earlier, Fl. Lt. Calum Falconer, a Typhoon pilot, described some of the differences he found coming from a smaller air force and working with Americans.
‘We brought to the table the attitude of having one tool that fits many locks,’ he said. ‘And they’ve got their way of looking at things which is a lot more bespoke.
‘They can use more specialized capabilities for more specialized nuts to crack as well.’
The Voyager is an example. It is equipped inside as if it were still a passenger jet, so it can operate in a dual role as troop transport and fuel tanker.
Two Typhoons come into view behind the left wing in the last refuelling dance of the day.
After that it is home to Nellis Air Force base just outside Las Vegas for a debrief.
For Winterbottom, the key is ensuring that the different forces can work together in a world where one day there could hundreds of F-35s stationed in Europe, but where only a few dozens are operated by the U.S.A.F.
‘Multinational integration is key,’ he said. ‘We win future conflicts as a coalition.’
