Decimomannu opened on 3 June 1940 as Campo di Manovra Segreto N°34: an unpaved strip roughly 2,000 metres long on about 350 hectares of the Campidano, built because Sardinia sits astride the routes between Italy, North Africa and the western Mediterranean. The 32° Stormo brought its S.M.79s over from Cagliari-Elmas, and on 11 June 1940 twenty-one of them bombed Bizerte. On 1 August 1940 General Stefano Cagna led seventeen S.M.79s against a British force near the Balearics and was shot down.

The 36° Stormo operated from Deci from 1941 to 1943 and lost seven aircraft in a single action against Force H on 27 September 1941. Luftwaffe He 111 torpedo bombers of KG 26 worked from the field in early 1943, and the first Allied bombing came on 17 February that year. After the armistice the Americans took the field and enlarged it out of recognition: P-40s of the 325th Fighter Group on 23 September 1943, then the B-26 Marauders of the 319th and 320th Bombardment Groups, whose first mission flew on 12 November.

The best-remembered American innovation was operational rather than structural. From February 1944 the field used a system of parallel take-off lanes — six main and six alternating — that let six B-26s roll simultaneously and put more than a hundred bombers in the air within minutes, cutting assembly time and adding roughly fifty miles to the combat radius. Crews called it the Flying Circus. The last American B-26 mission flew on 18 September 1944 and the groups moved to Corsica three days later. Then the field was abandoned for a decade.

Construction restarted in 1954. A paved runway 3,000 metres by 45 was finished in 1955 and the field was proved on 15 May 1957 by a C-119. The reason was straightforward: NATO needed a place in Europe where fighter crews could fire live weapons over empty ground and empty sea, in weather that did not cancel the programme, and Sardinia was the obvious answer.

The Italian Centro Addestramento al Tiro was established on 15 February 1957 and the Royal Canadian Air Force set up its own unit that spring. The arrangement was formalised by a tripartite agreement signed on 16 December 1959 between Italy, Canada and West Germany, effective in 1960, which made Italy responsible for logistics and infrastructure while the users paid their share. The base was named for Colonel Giovanni Farina on 1 March 1961 and inaugurated on 12 April with Italian, Canadian, German, American and NATO flags on the pole.

The German Air Force detachment began operating on 26 September 1960 with F-84F Thunderstreaks of JaboG 32, and Germany became the largest user. Canada left in 1970 and the Royal Air Force took its place in July; USAFE ran a permanent detachment from 1970 to 1973 and used Deci as a technical stop for aircraft moving to and from Vietnam. On 1 July 1970 the Italian organisation took the name it still carries, the Reparto Sperimentale e di Standardizzazione al Tiro Aereo. It is worth saying plainly, because the confusion is common, that Italy’s flight test centre, the Reparto Sperimentale di Volo, is at Pratica di Mare and not here.

Before instrumentation, air combat training ended in a debriefing room with several pilots describing different fights. The USAF began installing Air Combat Manoeuvring Instrumentation at Decimomannu in 1973 and the Cubic-built system became operational in October 1979 — the European equivalent of the ranges at Nellis and Yuma, and the first of its kind on this side of the Atlantic.

It worked by hanging a pod on each aircraft that reported position and attitude continuously to a ground network: a master tracking station and seven remote ranging units, six of them mounted on buoys in the sea off Sardinia. The system tracked up to eight participating aircraft in real time and replayed the engagement afterwards, with simulated weapon envelopes resolved by the computer rather than by the loudest pilot in the room. The 2002 Advanced ACMI replaced the radio ranging with GPS and datalink.

The cost was split in proportion to use, and the split says everything about who was actually there: the Luftwaffe 49 per cent, the RAF 20 per cent, the Italian Air Force 16 per cent and USAFE 15 per cent. The USAF’s 527th Aggressor Squadron flew F-5Es and then F-16Cs in Soviet-pattern tactics until 1990. In November 1986 Italian pilots were cleared for dissimilar air combat training at Deci, and the first official engagement was Royal Navy Sea Harriers against Italian F-104s.

By the mid-1980s the field was running about 450 movements a day and roughly 60,000 a year, 45,000 of them tactical, which made it the busiest military airfield in Europe, and burning more than a million litres of fuel a day. A hydrant refuelling system with 51 points entered service in 1986 so aircraft could be turned round on the ramp without fuel trucks. For a generation of European fighter pilots, a detachment to Deci was the high point of the training year.

The end of the Cold War took the traffic away in stages. The USAF’s 7555th Tactical Training Squadron was disbanded in 1991 and USAFE withdrew, keeping ownership of the ACMI; the RAF left in 1998, after which the base ran on an essentially bilateral Italian-German basis with costs split evenly. The strangest episode of the period came in 1991, when the Luftwaffe brought the MiG-29s it had inherited from East Germany to Sardinia, in what is described as the first official simulated engagement between former Warsaw Pact and NATO aircraft.

Germany stayed until 2016. The last campaign ran from late August to mid-September with about a dozen Eurofighters of Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 31 "Boelcke" from Nörvenich, 300 personnel and sixty tonnes of equipment in sixteen containers, flying up to twenty sorties a day with a Learjet jammer and two contracted A-4N aggressors. The aircraft left on 15 September and the people on 16 September; the withdrawal completed on 31 December. In between, the Libyan crisis had briefly filled the ramp again in 2011 with Spanish, Dutch and Emirati detachments.

Nothing about Decimomannu makes sense without the ranges. Capo Frasca, about 1,400 hectares on the west coast, is one of the very few places left in Italy where inert weapons can actually be dropped. Salto di Quirra, near Perdasdefogu, covers some 12,000 hectares and is the largest military range in Italy; it has been used since 1956 for missile and weapons testing and for rocket launches, from sounding rockets in the 1960s to Vega motor testing and a 33-million-euro space propulsion facility inaugurated on 5 October 2021.

Sardinians have been arguing about this for fifty years, and the argument is not fringe. The A Foras platform, a coalition of dozens of associations, puts 60 to 66 per cent of Italy’s military land servitudes on an island with 8 per cent of the national territory and 2.5 per cent of its population; over 35,000 hectares are under servitude. A demonstration at Capo Frasca on 12 October 2019 drew between 1,000 and 4,000 people, and another in Cagliari on 2 June 2024 drew over 500. The case is about land, coastline, fishing and depopulation, not only noise.

The health question is the hardest part and deserves to be stated precisely. Around Quirra, residents reported an apparent excess of cancers and of birth defects in people and in livestock — the so-called Quirra syndrome — and thorium and depleted uranium were alleged as causes. Eight former range commanders were tried at Lanusei for aggravated failure to take precautions against accidents and disasters, covering 2004 to 2010. On 11 November 2021, after eight years of proceedings involving 167 people diagnosed with tumours and leukaemias, all eight were acquitted for want of adequate proof that the offence had occurred.

That verdict is what the record says, and it should be reported as such rather than as vindication or cover-up: the court found the charge unproven, it did not establish that nothing happened, and no epidemiological finding either way has settled the question. The ordinary friction continues meanwhile. In 1971 an 18-year-old fisherman from Terralba, Manfredi Cadelano, was hit by aircraft gunfire inside the prohibited sea area off Capo Frasca.

The airfield still does the thing it was rebuilt to do. The RSSTA runs the ranges and the standardisation work, allied air forces still deploy for live weapons and instrumented air combat training, and the 80° Centro C/SAR covers Sardinian waters with the HH-139A.

The new part is the International Flight Training School. Announced at Farnborough on 18 July 2018 by Leonardo and the Italian Air Force, it began at Lecce-Galatina and moved to Decimomannu from 2022, the first course starting there in July 2022. It teaches Phase IV, lead-in fighter training, on 22 M-346 Masters — 18 Italian Air Force T-346As and four owned by Leonardo — with two full-mission simulators and three part-task trainers, and roughly one simulator hour for every flight hour. The campus runs to 130,000 square metres with about 35,000 of buildings, 40 instructors and a design capacity of up to 80 pilots a year.

There is a certain symmetry to it. Decimomannu was built up in the 1950s because other countries needed Italian sky and Italian ground; it now earns its keep because other countries need Italian instructors, with Germany, Qatar, Japan, Singapore and Austria among the customers. The traffic is a fraction of what it was, the German hangars are empty, and the political argument about what Sardinia is being asked to host has not gone away.