American fighter crews came out of Vietnam with an exchange ratio of about two to one — and for a stretch of Linebacker in the summer of 1972 it slipped to roughly even. That was not what a decade of missile-age doctrine had promised. Crews had been trained to shoot at radar contacts beyond visual range and had almost never fought a dissimilar aircraft, because peacetime safety rules discouraged it.

The Air Force went back through its own combat data and found something specific enough to act on: a crew that survived its first ten missions was very much more likely to survive the rest of the tour. The danger was concentrated at the start, in the gap between what training had taught and what combat actually demanded.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard “Moody” Suter’s answer was to move those ten missions into peacetime. Build a range that behaves like enemy territory, put a dedicated enemy force on it, and let crews make their expensive mistakes in Nevada. General Robert J. Dixon at Tactical Air Command approved it and told them to have it running within six months. The first Red Flag flew in November 1975 with 37 aircraft.

It never stopped. By October 2022 the Air Force counted 423,248 sorties, 783,907 flying hours and 164,724 aircrew from 29 countries. A modern iteration runs three weeks and puts well over a hundred aircraft into the same piece of sky, now with space and cyber effects layered on top of the flying.

An Aggressor squadron exists to lose convincingly, or to win instructively. The 64th traces its adversary lineage to 1972, stood up for the same reason Red Flag was: American pilots kept meeting Soviet tactics for the first time in combat. The 65th has come and gone with the budget cycle — F-5s in the seventies and eighties, F-15s from 2005, stood down in 2014, and reactivated in June 2022 on the F-35A.

That last change is the interesting one. An Aggressor force has to imitate the threat, and the threat is now stealthy. Simulating a fifth-generation adversary with a repainted fourth-generation jet stopped being credible, so the Air Force gave its professional enemies the F-35.

The paint is doctrine, not decoration. Aggressor F-16s have worn schemes that track whatever the real adversary is flying, most recently a digital splinter pattern modelled on the Su-57. The point is that a pilot rolling out behind one should be looking at a shape and a colour they will recognise if they ever see it for real.

The culture is unusual. Success is not measured by the Aggressors’ own kill count but by what the Blue Air crews learn from being beaten. As one 64th chief of training put it, the squadron is “the go-to for adversary tactics, capabilities and limitations” — a research job with a flying suit attached.

Between 1979 and 1988 the Air Force flew real MiG-17s, MiG-21s and MiG-23s against its own aircrew from Tonopah Test Range, a hundred miles north-west of Nellis. The unit was the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, the Red Eagles, and the programme was called Constant Peg.

The name is an accident of two people. General Charles Donnelly’s call sign was Constant; the first commander, Colonel Gaillard Peck, had a wife named Peg. Peck put the two together and it stuck.

Conditions matched the secrecy. Maintainers lived at Tonopah five days a week in double-wide trailers with tyres on the roofs to hold them down in the wind. Pilots commuted from Nellis, flew Soviet aircraft with no factory support and no manuals worth the name, and went home to ordinary suburbs in the evening without mentioning any of it. The accident rate ran at roughly 100 per 100,000 flying hours, which is an order of magnitude worse than a normal fleet, and is what happens when you fly ageing aircraft you cannot buy spares for.

By the time it ended, more than 15,000 sorties had exposed nearly 6,000 American aircrew to the real thing. Sixty-nine pilots flew as Red Eagles, each with a Bandit number. Three people died: Navy Lieutenant Hugh Brown in a MiG-17 in 1979, Captain Mark Postai in a MiG-23 in 1982, and Technical Sergeant Rey Hernandez in a ground accident. The programme was declassified in 2006, and the men who had flown it could finally say where they had been.

The Thunderbirds formed in 1953 and moved to Nellis in June 1956. The aircraft have changed roughly every decade — Thunderjet, Thunderstreak, Super Sabre, a famously brief spell on the F-105, Phantom, T-38, and the F-16 since 1983 — but the shape of the job has not. A season runs from mid-March to mid-November, and the formations are flown with the jets close enough that the whole thing depends on the wingmen watching the leader and nothing else.

That dependence is exactly what made 18 January 1982 so bad. During a practice loop at Indian Springs, all four aircraft of the Diamond flew into the ground together. The investigation pointed at a control problem in the leader’s aircraft; the other three, flying formation as they are trained to, followed him down. Four pilots were killed. The team was grounded, and when it came back it came back on the F-16.

Selection is a two-year tour for officers and three to four for the enlisted members, and federal rules cap the season, so the team deliberately turns over about half its people every year to keep experience mixed with new blood. In 2023 it took its first Air National Guard demonstration pilot.

The Weapons School began as a gunnery school in 1949 and became the Fighter Weapons School in 1954. In 1992 it dropped the word “fighter”, because by then it was teaching bomber, rescue, reconnaissance and eventually space and cyber crews as well. Today it runs 21 squadrons, fourteen of them at Nellis and seven elsewhere.

The Weapons Instructor Course runs about five and a half months and produces roughly 130 graduates every six months, each with something like 400 contact hours behind them. It is designed to be survivable but not comfortable: students are pushed until they fail, repeatedly, on the theory that an instructor who has never been beaten is no use to a squadron.

What comes out is a patch worn on the left shoulder and a particular kind of authority. A C-130 weapons officer described the course as “the toughest school I’ve ever been to in my life, hands down”, and summed up the expected manner in three words: humble, credible, approachable. In February 2026 the school graduated its first enlisted airman from the newly merged intelligence course.

It is not the same thing as Red Flag, and it is not the Air Force’s version of TOPGUN in any tidy sense. Red Flag is a three-week exercise that squadrons attend; the Weapons School is a graduate degree that individuals are sent to, and its remit now runs far wider than fighters.

The Nevada Test and Training Range is the reason all of this happens here rather than somewhere greener. Roughly 4,500 square miles of ground and up to 12,000 square kilometres of restricted airspace, threaded with electronic combat ranges, threat emitters and mock surface-to-air missile sites laid out to match real foreign installations.

“Instrumented” is the word that matters. The range is wired for tracking and scoring, so that every engagement can be reconstructed afterwards. Red Flag’s value is not really the flying; it is the debrief, where a crew is shown precisely how they died.

The range shares a boundary with the facility at Groom Lake that everyone calls Area 51. It is worth being precise about this, because almost nothing written about it is. Area 51 sits inside the range complex but is not a Nellis unit and is administered separately. The United States government has officially acknowledged exactly one thing about it: a 2013 CIA release confirmed the site existed and was used to flight-test the U-2 and the A-12. Everything beyond that is either still classified or was never true.