The Air Force announced on Monday the opening of its Virtual Test and Training Center (VTTC) at Nellis AFB, which it boasts will give pilots a more realistic training experience for the kinds of challenges they could potentially face when squaring off against the Russian Armed Forces or Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
"There's no live training venue for the joint force - and certainly for the Air Force - that's big enough or that has the threat density that can replicate what China or Russia can do," Air Force Warfare Center Commander Maj. Gen. Chuck Corcoran told Military.com. "So the live training venues ... and testing venues we have, we have to do what we can on those, collect data, and then feed that into the virtual world and scale it to the size and scope we need."
VTTC director Col. Dean Caldwell said in the USAF release that the VTTC would be “up and running” in the next year, at which point it “will then be turned into a squadron and be placed under the Nevada Test and Training Range.”
Nellis is already a hub for Air Force pilot training, as it hosts international air combat exercises such as Red Flag and close air support drills like Green Flag-West. In these exercises, the adversaries faced by US and allied pilots, referred to as “aggressors,” are already painted in the blue camouflage pattern used by the Russian Air Force.
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“The VTTC is a great complimentary piece to live-fly sorties,” Peter Zupas, an operational training and test infrastructure analyst at the Warfare Center, said in the release. “It will allow personnel to increase the number of sorties that otherwise wouldn’t be regularly available to them in live fly. However, simulators are no substitute for live-fly operations.”
According to Military.com, the VTTC will include simulators for F-15E Strike Eagles, F-35 Lightning IIs, F-22 Raptors and F-16 Fighting Falcons. However, development of the F-35’s high-tech simulators, dubbed the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) or “F-35 in a box,” has been repeatedly delayed, most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. The JSE’s delay has also delayed the F-35 program’s transition to full production, forcing the Pentagon to buy the stealthy jet in small batches.
Last week, US Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Sustainment Ellen Lord said she was “confident that we are going to meet the March date” for completing the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) process.