COMBAT EDGE
IT’S THE REQUIREMENT that everyone’s talking about — contracted aggressor services. Whether it’s for air-to-air bogeys, cost-effective Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) training or simulating anti-ship missiles for naval air defense controllers — this is big business. It’s also tailored business, able to be shifted around and configured as required by customers.
Those customers are growing in what has become one of the biggest emerging markets in modern aerospace. From massive US Air Force requirements for contracted Red Air aggressors, to the United Kingdom’s need for a new generation of threat training under the £750-million Air Support to Defence Operational Training (ASDOT) project.
The surge in contracted support comes due to a number of factors. Not least it’s about air forces with reduced mass, but with an increasing need to tax and challenge advanced platforms. The era of advanced simulators is clearly off setting some of the high costs of training, but it cannot replicate real-world events.
Many air forces cannot afford large teams of in-house aggressors or to eat up precious flight hours on their advanced fighters by using them as relatively benign in-house targets for train…
