Title:  "SIMULATION SHADOWLAND"

JOURNAL of ELECTRONIC DEFENSE . NOV. 94, Pages 35-36

Authors: Stephen M Hardy and Zachary A. Lum

...

Fittingly enough, the Air Force has built its biggest electronic 
combat "playground" in a stretch of wasteland not far from the 
gaming capital of the world, Las Vegas. Sprawling over 5 million 
acres of the Nevada desert and coopting an additional 12,000 mi2 
of airspace overhead, the Nellis AFB Fighter Weapons Center (FWC) 
range complex can rightly lay claim to its title as the largest 
contiguous air and ground space available for instrumented 
military training operations in the world. Developed to provide 
realistic arenas for aircrew training, operational testing of 
equipment and tactics development, the live-fire Nellis ranges 
form an advanced airborne boot camp for Air Force (and frequently 
other service) ECtraining.

Responsibility for keeping the base's vast facilities up to par 
falls to a special caretaker unit, the 554th Range Group.  WIth 
range development logisitics and operations divisions, the 554th 
manages the acquisition and operations and maintenance support of 
threat simulators, instrumentation, communications systems and Air 
Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation (ACMI)/Red Flag Mission 
Debriefing System (RFMDS) modifications. It is also the focal 
point for scheduling, managing and controlling Red- and Blue-force 
operations at the complex.

Summertime at Nellis heralds the crowning point of the EC season, 
as hundreds of aircrew and support personnel arrive with their 
units to participate in Green Flag, the most daborate, EC 
intensive exercise conducted in the US military (see "Green Flag 
Revisited" by Lt Col J.J. Jordan, "JED", July 1992, p. 63). In 
order to provide individual and collective training to EC assets 
on such a large scale, Nellis can mix and match an impressive 
assortment of threat sim ulation equipment, mimicking red threat 
early-warning, ground-control intercept, target-acquisition, 
surfacc to-air (SAM) and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) defense and 
guidance radars, as well as equipment that captures and evaluates 
aircrew response.   

Not all of the equipment finds its way to the EC-dedicated North 
ranges, however, since Nellis also boasts an 8 million-acre (3 
million acres restricted, for the use of live munitions) Bombing 
and Gunnery Range. Here, targets representing everything from tank 
battle- ' fronts to SAM sites to industrial com plexes are 
protected by a variety of threat simulators and actual radar and 
communicationsjamming equipment, according to a Nellis press 
release.   

Although Nellis must report to the Air Combat Command (ACC) like 
the other ranges, it has its own two-star general and is fairly 
autonomous‹a "strange duck," as described by one Air Force 
official‹in its procurement de cisions. A list provided by the 
Sacra mento Air Logistic Center's (SM ALC's) Range Threat Systems 
Divi sion (McClellan AFB, CA), the focal point for acquisition, 
development and maintenance of threat simulators for tho Air 
Force, reveals Nellis's invento ry to include just about every 
piece of range equipment ever developed, as outlined in Table 1. 
Nellis is also a ce~ encficiary of two of the three principal new 
procurements at the SM ALC: Harris's MST-Tl(V) Mini MUTES, 
composed of a master control station and up to five remote emitter 
units (called pedestals), currently in the midst of a follow-on 
development to give it a blue/grey capability, and Sierra 
Technology's TPT-T1(V) Unmanned Threat Emitter (TJMTE), also 
master-slave configured, which is col located with targets to 
simulate dense ly deployed SAM and AAA terminal threats. (Nellis's 
PWC recently took delivery of three of the UMTEs.) AEL's MLQ-
T4(V)1 Ground Jammer, an I/J-band terrain following/avoidance- and 
bomb/navigation-radar jammer will go elsewhere--see Table 1.   

For future procurements, Nellis and the ACC have expressed an 
interest in purchasing the actual Russian equipment off the 
intenational market, where SAM systems have sold at bargain 
basement prices. According to Lt. Col Michael Smolin, systems 
program director at SM-ALC, Nellis has asked his center to 
investigate logistics/supportability issues that could affect such 
an acquisition. 

[Article continues, discussing other EW bases.]

Table 1: Simulation Equipment at Air Force Ranges

Nellis: 6 MTEs, 2 MSQ-T7Bs, 2 MSQ-T8Aa, 23 MPS-T1s, 5 MPQ-T3s, 2 
MSQ-T13s, 1 MPS-T9, 3 UMTEs, 15 TPT-4s, 7 SPS-66As, 15 TRTGs, 5 
MSQ-77s, 8 FXQ-4As (TOSS), 2 DA3Hs, 5 M-33s, 2 MPS-T10s, 2 MSQ-
T32s, 1 MSQ-T6, 1 MSP-14, 1 MSQ-T12, 1 MSY-T1