Those Magnificent Crew in their Simulated Flying Machines... Thoughts on the future of the RAF

 

It’s been a busy few weeks for the Royal Air Force, with a number of speeches and announcements being made that help give a sense of its future strategy and direction. Everything from simulated training to more drones to dispersal exercises and terabytes of data have been talked about in one way or another. But what does it all mean, and how well prepared is the RAF for the challenges of the next few years?

The first item of interest is the move that will see most of the training being done via simulators rather than conventional training aircraft. To some this is a major mistake, while to others it heralds an entirely new range of opportunities.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Simulators have long played a vital role in helping train pilots for all eventualities, and in particular the means to simulate events that may not always be safe to exercise for real, or which are particularly hard to simulate in real world conditions (e.g. unusual combinations of mechanical failures or weather).

But simulators have become significantly more advanced in recent years, and able to make much better use of network integration – suddenly you are working with others in the same exercise to help develop and practice tactics and evolve new ways of operating. It is also increasingly possible to bring different units, from different nations together, to train as one inside a simulator without anyone leaving their operating base.

There is a very compelling case to be made for increasing the proportion of simulator training for the RAF. Firstly, it allows aircrew to practise their operational planning using the full range of capabilities on their aircraft. It is easy to forget that modern fighters like the F35 are as much an electronic warfare and ISTAR platform as they are a strike aircraft. It is extremely challenging to properly simulate how these capabilities can be used in the real world without significant disruption.

To that end, simulator training enables you to practise the full range of tricks and work out how best to use the platform in an operation in a way you cannot do normally while airborne. It also allows you to practise using sensitive tactics or procedures that cannot be observed or captured by others. Given that achieving surprise is key in wartime, having a way of ensuring that you can get the most value out of a jet that costs tens of millions of pounds is vital – if our foes know how we plan to use it, many of its advantages are negated.

Given the increasing focus on international training too, the use of networked simulators is another positive step forward. It enables the UK to work with close allies like the US to carry out training using the tactics and equipment that would be used for real, without having the challenge of organising an international deployment and exercise.

There is no doubt that there is no substitute for training together in person, but if you plan to operate on the first night of operations, as the Chief of the Air Staff is clear that he wants the RAF to do, then you need every ounce of skill and cunning, and every possible tactical advantage you can get. Simulated training helps you gain the edge needed, without giving away to the opposition what you plan to do.

It brings with it wider advantages too – for example, if you rely more on simulators, then your requirement for jets diminishes. You need fewer as an attrition reserve for those lost in training, and you are flying fewer aircraft hours overall, reducing fatigue life accrual on the force, which means you need a smaller fleet than otherwise planned.

It does raise the interesting challenge about how you fly the aircraft for real, because if so much of what more advanced fighters do relies on electronic warfare, then how much of this can you accurately practise while flying for real, without both causing disruption and revealing the full capabilities of the jet?

The advantage of flying for real though is that it does help retain practical experience – both for the aircrew and more widely their support teams. Regular aircraft use, particularly in novel or challenging ways, may cause defects or issues to appear that will require maintenance to fix – the challenge with simulated training is that it keeps the pilot current, but it doesn’t provide any training or experience for the groundcrew who need to keep the aircraft airworthy.

Trying to strike a balance between simulated training that makes the most of the platforms potential, while ensuring that ground crew are not suffering from skills fade if they no longer get to practise unusual or niche maintenance will be an interesting challenge-  its not really possible to simulate the difficulty of replacing an obscure part that has occurred in a very unusual fault, and this sort of knowledge is easily lost.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The wider advantage of simulation training though is that it helps the RAF bring together the variety of platforms that it will be working with to help practise in a truly purple manner. The opportunities exist, not only to work with Army and RN units, who could be able to join in to demonstrate their own skills, but also other assets like uncrewed aircraft as well.

This will become ever more important as the RAF increasingly focuses resources on drones like Protector, for which a further 13 airframes were ordered this week. There is perhaps a tendency still to not regard the drone force as a ‘proper’ military aircraft – in some people’s heads because it isn’t flown with a pilot in its cockpit, it somehow doesn’t count.

Yet the acquisition of 16 protector aircraft does provide the RAF with a very substantial force multiplier that will be of long-term benefits. The huge advantage conferred with uncrewed aircraft like the Protector is their ability to stay on station for many hours, far longer than a crewed jet could manage, and still carry out both surveillance and strike missions.

They aren’t suitable for all environments, but what they do provide is long term presence and persistence that really adds up. The Protector has a 40hr endurance and can carry both Brimstone and Paveway weapons. If you consider how many crewed jets would be required to deliver the same effect as a single protector, plus all the supporting assets like AAR tankers, and additional ground crew and support chains, then you quickly realise how valuable it is.

Numbers are not everything, all too often we focus on the headline number of airframes and don’t ask what the effect they give is. For example, if you have 16 jets, how much endurance does this provide, how many can stay airborne at once and for how long, and what is the actual effect you are delivering?

In practical terms, 16 jets may give you the ability to keep four up at once on a sustained basis, but how does this compare to an RPAS force? How much maintenance does it require, what implications for crew rest, and how many airframe hours will be used up trying to keep the same level of cover as one single Protector airframe can provide?

In sheer capability terms, the Protector force is probably the equivalent of adding several dozen conventional jets into the order of battle, for the same output at the end. This is where drones will help have a significant impact on how the RAF works – they will provide significant additional capability at very limited cost and help cover off much of the routine work that would otherwise take up the time of busy and scare fast jet units.

Looking to the future, the RAF is clearly on a journey where drones have gone from a slightly odd thing that no one really understands but where there is some potential, to being an integral part of the force that no one can do without. They will revolutionise how the RAF works and deploys, and ensure it continues to have a global reach. It is likely that over the next few years, uncrewed aircraft will become an ever more prevalent part of the front line and do so in a way unthinkable just a few years ago.

But somethings will not change – even if the crew of a Protector is not in the cockpit, you still require crew locations to work from, and operate out of. This is fine in peacetime, but what happens if you need to disperse the force in a hurry?

This issue was brought into sharp focus last week when it emerged that the RAF is looking to reinstate rapid dispersal exercises, helping test its ability to move at no notice from main operating bases to dispersed locations in a crisis. This is of growing importance amid fears that these sites will be targeted in wartime and a well-timed strike could destroy the force.

The RAF is no stranger to dispersing its force – during the Cold War, for example, the V Force would have dispersed to airfields around the country, supported by ground crew, and stand ready to launch if required in wartime. These plans saw airfields around the UK quietly modified to house V bombers at short notice, and some of the structural changes made can still be seen.

The RAF of the 1960s was a vastly larger organisation with significantly more real estate, and the ability to disperse to a lot more locations. Today the RAF is smaller, and also has fewer bases to operate from. The emphasis has shifted from resilience and survival to main operating bases and concentrated support in one location.

The challenge of returning to a dispersed operating plan is that not only does it need real estate, but it also requires resources as well. It needs airfields that can be used as bolt holes, able to host, support and launch jets, and also maintain them. In the case of advanced fighter jets like the F35 or Typhoon force, it means working out how to deploy them to austere locations and support them on a long-term basis – not always as easy as it sounds.

It may be a simple matter to fly away from a location to another one but ensuring that the relevant ground support organisation and infrastructure is in place will be important. Particularly with a move to contracted engineering support, are the solutions in place to ensure that if an aircraft squadron deploys, the logistics can move with it support them, and what happens to in depth engineering support?

From a drone perspective, what does this mean for the force which operates in fixed cabins? How do you move the crews, ground control stations and other essential infrastructure in a hurry to an alternative location?

This sort of challenge can be overcome, but it will require significant investment and resources to get right. It also means a change to wider estate strategies – an MOD that is reliant on selling off real estate may now need to plan on both retaining and investing in bolt holes that have previously been neglected for many years.

The message it sends though is an important one – it is that the RAF is now thinking again about survivability on the home base, and not just operations abroad. This marks a significant shift in mentality, and a return to that of the Cold War resilience model. Thirty years after stepping away from this sort of operational practise, it is fascinating to see it return to the fore.

In some ways the RAF is focusing on returning to old practises, like dispersal, but at the same time it is very much focusing on new challenges too. The increasing utilisation of space, and the militarisation of space assets will call for a new way of thinking, focused not just on conventional airpower, but also space power too. The rise in data, particularly imagery gleaned from overhead satellites, or improved communications opens many possibilities, but also requires new ways of working.

The RAF will need to think carefully not just about how it manages these capabilities, but how it recruits and trains people to do this sort of work. The traditional image of the RAF as a force of fighter pilots and fast jets supported by ground crew will remain in part, but it will be as increasingly important to recruit cyber specialists and people able to work in the space domain, for the RAF to become an Aerospace Force.

Over the next few years, the RAF will need to balance off the difficult challenge of maintaining a globally deployable and capable air force capable of fighting in the most difficult circumstances, while also transitioning to a point where delivery of airpower is just one part of its remit and responsibilities.  This will make for an interesting culture shift, particularly as space operations, the cyber domain and the uncrewed drone force become ever more prevalent.

Conducting military operations involving airpower will mean more than just sending an aircraft on a mission to bomb somewhere and relying on the natural skill of the pilot to succeed. It will call for a truly integrated approach, of space-based intelligence products providing targeting information, augmented by the ISTAR feed generated by drones, and protected by the cyber defence skills integral to protect networks. This in turn will see support delivered, not just by crewed aircraft, but networks of drones, or long-range missiles or other technology, and done in a way that may see people based around the world operate together on a single mission.

It’s a far cry from the early days of airpower, when biplanes fought in the skies above France, but the mission in many ways remains the same. Use cutting edge technology to gain intelligence to provide an information advantage, then using this advantage, deliver lethal force to support troops on the ground and advance national policy goals. Much has changed, but the outcome remains the same.

Its an extremely interesting time for the RAF, with significant challenges ahead. One thing will remain the same though – the quality of the men and women joining will remain first rate, and they will continue to meet and live up to the high standards and expectations of their service. They will be charged, like every generation of RAF personnel, with fundamentally changing how the RAF fights, while embracing new technology and change to in the process. In some ways nothing has changed at the same time as everything has changed.