Code One Magazine: USAF Weapons School, Training Weapon Officers at Nellis AFB, NV

Graduates of the United States Air Force Weapons School are easy to spot. Their shoulders are marked by yellow-and-black bull's eye/crosshair patches that read "graduate" on the top and "US Air Force Weapons School" across the bottom. The fact that the emblem is the only exception to flightsuit patch regulations says a lot about the school and about how highly the Air Force regards it. The patch also says a lot about the course of study the Air Force has to offer. They are weapons officers.

"The patch identifies our graduates and gives them instant credibility," explains Col. Bentley Rayburn, the commandant of the school. "Most people in the general population, though, haven't heard of the weapons school. Some say we need a catchy moniker, like Top Gun. But that's not our style. We would rather be known in terms of our value to the US Air Force. The fighter world has always known who we are and what we do."

For those who don't know, Rayburn, who has been in charge of the school for over two years, is happy to pull out a slide projector and inform. "After we slap a patch on these students, they return to their units and become chief instructor pilots for flying and for setting up academics," Rayburn says. "They are the technical experts. They advise their commanders on weapon systems and tactics. They are role models, too. They set standards for excellence in the air and on the ground."

Producing exemplary instructors is one of three interrelated missions of the school. A second mission is to improve the general combat capability of the entire Air Force. "We return our most recent graduates to the field with the latest and greatest information," Rayburn continues. "The school's instructors get out and spend time with the units, teaching and flying with them. We also improve capability through our textbooks and other course materials and through our quarterly journal, USAF Weapons Review."

The third mission relates to the school's reputation. "We're seen as a repository of information and expertise," Rayburn says. "Whenever the United States has faced a difficult situation, senior commanders will call us for help with planning." As examples, the school sent people to Saudi Arabia to be on the planning staff during the Gulf War and has assisted in planning subsequent actions against Iraqi radar installations and potential military options for operations in Haiti. The school was called when Iraqi Republican guards once again threatened the Kuwaiti border in the fall of 1994.

"We also are often one of the first places a contractor calls when there's something wrong with a system," says Lt. Col. Don Ross, the deputy commandant at the school.

"They call us first for a number of reasons. We have the subject experts here, and we have the highest level of aggregate experience. Because we're not directly tied to an acquisition system, we can be more up front and not guard our words."

The weapons school is organized in nine divisions of which seven are flying divisions pertaining to specific aircraft-the A-10, F-15C, F-15E, F-16, F-111, B-1, and the B-52. The other two divisions instruct intelligence officers and command and control officers. F-111 students attend class at and fly from Cannon AFB in New Mexico. B-1 and B-52 students are located with their aircraft at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota. All other students and aircraft go to class and fly from the school's headquarters at Nellis AFB in Nevada. Everyone goes to Nellis for the final two weeks of the school and graduation. The school supplies its own aircraft, so squadrons do not have to sacrifice air assets to send a student.

Getting to the school is as difficult as the coursework. Prospective students must be nominated by their commanders. They must meet minimum requirements for flying hours in their particular aircraft, including time as an instructor pilot. They must have no more than nine year's service in the Air Force (most students are captains with five to six years of service). "We're looking for applicants who are old enough to have proven their basic capabilities yet young enough for us to get a good payback from them," Rayburn explains.

Once nominated by their squadron, applicants compete for a limited number of slots at the wing level. Wing commanders select and rank applications and forward them to a selection board headed by the commandant of the school. The board works much like a promotion board. The selection process usually takes a year. Rarely does an applicant make it through the process and to the school on the first try.

"Before applicants are nominated by a commander to come here, they have to be highly regarded," Ross points out. "The first level of the application process reflects what their peers think of them. Once the applicants get to the board level, they are judged solely by their personnel files." Only seven percent of the USAF fighter pilot community ever attends the school. Interestingly, though, in the past, up to fifty percent of fighter squadron commanders have been graduates of the weapons school. "Our graduates generally do very well," Rayburn adds. "You can debate whether it is a function of their coming here or a function of our picking the best people to come here."

Only the best of these best are invited back to the school to be instructors. The three-year assignment is about the only one left in the Air Force that is done by name, rather than by anonymous accomplishments in a personnel file. Few former graduates decline the invitation. The school has a staff of about 160, fifty to sixty of which are instructors. For the flying divisions, every instructor flies. The classroom work, however, is split among the instructors' areas of expertise.

Many of those teaching at the school took part in the Gulf War. Maj. Mark Miller, an F-16 pilot who has taught at the school for almost three years, was one of the school's first instructors with Gulf War experience. "The experience is definitely useful," Miller says. "We can teach maneuvers to defeat SAMs and AAA threats on the chalkboard, but the best explanations don't compare with actual experience in combat. To say that something works from our own experience carries an extra value."

Weapons school lasts five and a half months with classes beginning every January and July. The school graduates about sixty-five students in each of two classes a year. For flying students, the coursework consists of 236 to 337 academic hours, depending on aircraft type. Sorties range from fourteen for B-1 students to forty-one for F-16 students (flying time is about the same across aircraft types). Radar controllers and intelligence officers go through about 400 hours of academic instruction and will normally receive some flying time as well. For crewmembers, the academics are front-loaded in the course. After three months, the book work is mostly finished and the flying becomes much more demanding.

"We could keep all the students here a year and not teach them everything that we could teach them," Ross says. "We have to cut the subject matter at some point. The multirole pilots have a tougher job because there's an inherent desire to do more air-to-air flying. People like to talk about aces, not about the guys that hit a ground target ten times in a row. But the US Air Force's primary business is to get bombs on target. We're constantly trying to strike the right balance between air-to-air basics and getting pilots mission oriented, which is dropping bombs. F-16 students face a big challenge because they can do so much with their airplane."

Ross points out that, though air-to-air skills are treated as a building block for air-to-ground operations for the multirole pilots, the skills are still operationally essential. "F-16s and F-15Es may have to defend themselves air-to-air when going into the target even though they are carrying bombs," Ross says. "Air-to-air maneuvering also teaches them about the airplane itself because it explores the entire envelope. So we always begin with air-to-air maneuvering even though it may be only a small part of their job. We give students a solid understanding of what their airplane is supposed to feel like-what it is telling them when it is at the edge of the envelope or when it is at optimum maneuvering."

Students also get a feel for dropping and firing live weapons during the course. F-16 pilots, for example, will typically drop Mk-82s, Mk-84s, a laser-guided bomb, a cluster bomb, and shoot either a Sidewinder or an AMRAAM missile. "If we had our way," Ross says, "every student would drop or shoot everything that could come off his aircraft. Live fire has hidden benefits. Every time we fire a weapon, we learn something new about it. We often feed this information back to the engineers. Expending live weapons represents a significant cost, so it indicates the commitment the Air Force has to this school."

The syllabus for flying builds from simple 1-v-1 aerial engagements and basic bombing missions to intricately planned and coordinated attacks on ground targets defended by large packages of adversary aircraft, helicopters, ground forces, and ground-based defense systems. Up to seventy aircraft participate in these latter missions of what is called the mission employment phase. These missions and every encounter within them are watched, reviewed, and analyzed on a one-of-a-kind electronic tracking system the school borrows from Red Flag operations at Nellis. The system, called the Red Flag measurement and debriefing system, is an advanced relative of air combat maneuvering instrumentation (ACMI) used on several ranges around the United States. The Red Flag system can track every flight parameter of thirty-six high-activity aircraft as well as the movements of sixty other aircraft.

The USAF Weapons School traces its origins to 1949 when the USAF Air Training Command established a fighter gunnery school at Nellis. The school was created to train instructors, develop training methods and techniques, and set standards for training. The first aircraft at the school were P-51 Mustangs and F-80 Shooting Stars. The F-86A replaced the F-51 in 1952. The school became the Fighter Weapons School in 1954. Through the years, the school has adapted to aircraft adopted by the Air Force. F-100 fighters came in 1955; the F-4 and F-105 in 1965; the F-111 and A-7 in 1974; the F-15 in 1977; the A-10 in 1978; and the F-16 in 1982. The school began instructing radar controllers and intelligence officers in the 1980s.

"We don't get into testing of new systems," Ross explains. "But as soon as something has been blessed, we want to work it into our syllabus." That something may be a new gizmo, like night-vision goggles for a particular airplane, the latest intel system for getting immediate imagery from satellites, or a new airplane. "Once Lockheed starts producing the F-22," Ross continues, "the Air Force will first send it to a training unit and the first operational unit and, simultaneously, to operational testing squadrons and to the weapons school. It takes about two years to build up in the field so we have a place for weapons officers to go and some time to come up with a syllabus. The Air Force, for example, started flying the F-16 in 1979. The airplane became operational in 1980 at Hill AFB in Utah. It came here in 1982."

Aircraft and technological improvements have lengthened the course through the years. "Time has never been a luxury here," Ross explains. "We could add another six months and not get it all. When I went through the school in 1981, it was three months long. It went to four months in 1986. After the Gulf War, it went to its present five and a half months. Weapon systems in the early 1980s were fairly simple machines by today's standards. As our airplanes have advanced over the last ten years, it takes more time to absorb all the information to use them properly. A capability like LANTIRN adds a brand new dimension to flying. Precision-guided munitions are another new facet. Those new systems require more time to teach.

"We can't produce someone who is proficient with every weapon a particular airframe can carry," Ross continues. "The Air Force does not have enough training dollars and flying time for that. We strive for a weapons officer who can instruct all of them because he has been exposed to them here and has kept his notes. No one can become, and remain, totally proficient."

Perhaps the biggest change at the school occurred in 1992 when it began instructing B-1 and B-52 bomber crews. The integration of bombers followed the consolidation of Strategic Air Command with Tactical Air Command to form Air Combat Command. To recognize its expanded scope, the school dropped fighter from its title and became formally known as the USAF Weapons School. The school's reputation in the fighter world, however, has not automatically transferred to what used to be the SAC world. "As we bring in the bombers and, possibly, other airplanes, we have a larger educational job," explains Rayburn. "These units must go through a cultural change as they get these weapons officers. They need to understand how to use them properly and how to take advantage of them."

For students, the weapons school represents an ultimate mental challenge. If all their work during the course could be transferred to that patch they receive on graduation, they would walk around in tight counterclockwise circles from all the weight on their left shoulders. "It's been a long five and a half months," admits Capt. Lee Elsarelli, an A-10 student. "We average two to three flights per week. We have academics three to four days a week for several hours a day. The training is to such a higher level than I'm used to. I get a lot more out of each sortie and learn more about the airplane and how to be a better instructor."

Elsarelli, who flew night missions in the A-10 during the Gulf War, came to the school as an A-10 instructor pilot from Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona. Normally, graduates return to their units. Since the Air Force tries to disperse graduates among its wings and since Davis-Monthan sent three students, Elsarelli is going to Spangdahlem AB in Germany from the school.

Elsarelli credits some weapons officers who were his role models and an urge to improve upon what he has experienced from weapons officers for his desire to come to the school. "Weapons officers often have a reputation of getting bogged down in minutia, of being overly concerned with things the average pilot doesn't care about," he explains. "Some may deserve that reputation. They leave here with a lot of excitement about everything they've learned and that can be a trap. They may, for example, want to analyze every lift coefficient and every move in part of a particular maneuver in a debrief. The person across the desk wants to debrief to bombs on the target, the big items, and go have a beer. The better weapons officers understand the technical aspects, but they keep a grip on the larger picture.

Elsarelli understands the big picture as well. "I'll leave the course with an ability to speak on the finer details," he says, "but I know this ability will not necessarily be important on a daily basis. There will be times when the operational guys may want to analyze a maneuver down to those small details. Everyone who graduates from here can do the detailed analysis and instruction. Knowing when to do it is more of a personal style that comes with experience. We have to remember that everyone is not training to a weapons school level. A weapons officer must be able to integrate into a particular level of training and bring those people at that level up. We can't expect people to train to our level."

The weapon school's high standing within the Air Force often creates exaggerated expectations for incoming students. "The school has a reputation as being a rite of passage-a haze of constant academics, intricate flying, and detailed debriefings," Elsarelli explains. "The perception is that instructors put their students through an ordeal because they themselves had to endure it to get the patch. Everything they say about the intensity level is true, but the instructors have a helpful attitude. There's no antagonism. I have really enjoyed the experience. The instructors set up some obstacles. But they're doing it to make us think and learn more. If someone is having trouble getting over those obstacles, the instructors tend to help them get around.

The school's reputation may have something to do with graduates' memories of its sustained intensity level. No one calls it easy. "I can never explain to people what this school is like," says Karen Stevens, an air weapons controller student from Elmendorf AFB, Alaska. "I can spell out how many hours they are going to spend during certain phases of the course and describe the types of missions they will be involved with, but I can't convey a true sense of the course to people who have not been through it. The experience has been so foreign to anything else I've done in my career.

"For one thing," she continues, "students are under constant evaluation. Someone is always watching us. We never do anything in isolation. Having everything we do evaluated for six months is difficult. We may be critiqued only once or twice a year at home. The school is somewhat like a training exercise, but the level of training is very high. And the standards are even higher. If we make a mistake, we may have to redo an entire mission. Then we may get way behind because everything is on a strict timeline."

For Capt. Kirk Kimmet, an intelligence officer from Dyess AFB, Texas, the weapons school is equally intense. "I've already proved myself just to get through the selection process," he explains. "I couldn't be completely sure what to expect. I knew it would be tough. I was 100 percent right about that. This is harder than anything I've ever done in my life. But when I reach the end of the road and realize how much I have learned, I can understand it was worth the price. The biggest surprise is the constant pressure and observation once here. I have a week and a day left, and the pressure is the same as it was five months ago."

Capt. Mike Clark, a B-1 student also from Dyess, says the intensity level was the toughest aspect of the course for him as well. "It is a challenge to take care of the little things," Clark says, "like getting a haircut, because we're in class all the time. The schedule is most challenging. I can't compare what I knew when I came in with what I now know going out. It's not quantifiable. I've developed a whole new mindset on how to approach my job and how I am going to help others in the squadron do their job."

"I didn't expect the volume of information to come my way in such a short period of time," says Capt. John Bernier, a B-52 student from Ellsworth AFB. "It was a shock to my system. I'll leave knowing much more about my weapon system and how to employ my aircraft with everybody else. I've gained an appreciation for the big picture. My knowledge base wasn't as good as I thought it was when I came here. There's so much out there to be learned. Everyday I think of something new I can use back in my unit. I should keep a log."

Elsarelli reiterates what most students say about a large amount of work squeezed into what ends up seeming like a small amount of time. "The academics are time consuming and demanding," Elsarelli says. "Our responsibilities as students are well defined. The most difficult part of the course is managing time. We have so much to do and only so much time in which to do it. But the course is designed that way."

Maj. Steve Dingee, one of the F-15 instructors at the school, compares the school to a moving sidewalk. "Then the students show up, the sidewalk is already moving at a quick clip," he says. "They get on and they stumble backwards a riffle. After two or three weeks, they are up to speed. They learn to do things at ninety miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, for five and a half months straight. When they go back to the field, they may shoot off the end of the sidewalk. Someone at their unit invariably grabs them and tells them to slow down."

Dingee, who put his skills as a weapons officer to work during the Gulf War, says the intensity and pacing of the course have some benefits that few people immediately recognize. "I was a walking zombie during the first seven days of Desert Storm," Dingee admits. "I was working what seemed like twenty-four hours a day planning missions, flying, debriefing. The time management problems students face here teach them how to get a lot of things accomplished in a small amount of time and how to delegate work to others. We certainly put a lot of pressure on them with the syllabus. And they put a lot of pressure on themselves-we get a few overachievers. But that is the type of person who makes a good weapons officer. These students are already accomplished instructors in their own right."

The fact that students are already accomplished when they enter the school accounts for what may be the biggest surprise from the course-improvements in their own flying abilities. "I didn't expect the level of my own flying proficiency to go up as much as it has," says Elsarelli, who has flown attack aircraft since 1986. "I viewed this as another set of training with better training assets than I was used to. It has been that and more. I'm flying with top-level instructors on a daily basis. A group on one training sortie without one low-hour new guy flies and fights to a different level than a group assembled from a normal operational unit. With everyone here being 1,500- to 2,000-hour instructor pilots, we achieve a higher level of training and see fewer basic mistakes."

Being surrounded by highly proficient pilots is one part of the training equation at the weapons school. Improvements also come from a well-measured balance of time devoted to flying and debriefing. "Operational units have so much other stuff piled on them that the student doesn't have here," Rayburn explains. "That is one of the biggest advantages of the course. The students can put everything else aside for a few months and concentrate on their basic jobs. They have the time to learn as much as they possibly can to a degree and depth they can't achieve in regular operations."

Most pilots understand that too much flying can be as detrimental to their proficiency as too little flying. Rayburn uses economic theory to illustrate this point. "The Laffer curve in economics explains that if you tax at a zero rate, you get zero revenue," he says. "And if you tax at a higher rate, you get more revenue — to a point. If you tax at a 100 percent rate, you get zero revenue because no one can earn money. The same concept applies to training. If you never take off, you can't practice even the most basic skills. If you fly five sorties a month, you are better off. Ten, even better. But forty or fifty sorties a month can diminish pilot skills. You never have a chance to figure out what you did wrong or to think about how to do it better before you go out and fly again. When I went through the school, it was a four-month course and I flew thirty-two times. So that is eight sorties a month, which was probably half of what I was flying at my home squadron. But so much effort goes into planning, thinking, and practicing each sortie and then debriefing it. I was more proficient when I walked out of the school than I have been ever since."

Bernier backs up Rayburn's observation with his own experience in the B-52. "Back home, I don't have the day after the sortie to talk about it," he says. "Instead, I am getting ready for the next one. Here I have a good four or five hours the next day to talk about it. We're dissecting everything we do and analyzing it."

Most positions in the Air Force are highly compartmentalized. Fighter and bomber crews fit this description. They rarely come into contact with crews from another airframe. And when they do, the contact is brief. The weapons school exposes students to a variety of aircraft and capabilities. The exposure gives aircrews an appreciation for the capabilities of other aircraft that they may have to fly with as part of a composite force. The exposure, however, is most important for the intelligence and radar controller students who, by the nature of their jobs, interact with aircrews from a variety of aircraft.

"Aircrews will tell you that intel officers hide behind a green door where they keep all their secrets," says Kimmet, who looks forward to applying what he has learned at the school's intelligence officer division to a composite force. "Here, we interact daily with all the different airframes to show what we can provide. And we learn from them. Such a concentration of system knowledge exists nowhere else in the Air Force. If I have a question on the A-10, I can get an answer down the hall. Two doors down there's an F-16 pilot I can talk to."

Working with crews from a variety of aircraft has been the highlight of Kimmet's instruction. "I've always wanted to work with fighters," says Kimmet, who comes from a B-1 bomber unit. "This course has prepared me to go to a fighter unit or to a composite wing that has both fighters and bombers. Whether I eventually go to a composite force or not, chances are that, if I am deployed, I will be working with a variety of airframes. So I need to know about their capabilities."

"In the E-3 community, we have very limited opportunities to do face-to-face debriefs," says Capt. Kevin Jost, an E-3 AWACS radar controller from Tinker AFB, Oklahoma. "Debriefs and the briefings are a big part of the learning process for us here. We spend forty minutes briefing for a twenty-minute vulnerability time. Then we debrief extensively. Normally in an E-3 operation, we take off in the morning. We might call the guys that we are going to control beforehand and get a ten-minute plan from them. We talk to them from the airplane and control them. By the time we land that evening, they have completed their debrief and gone home for the day.

"I now have a better understanding of what I need to get out of a briefing and what to take away from a debrief," continues Jost. "I will take back this experience to the students I will be teaching. As a weapons officer, it will be my job to bridge the gap between the weapon director sitting on a scope and the pilots in the cockpit."

"The benefit of this exposure works both ways," says Capt. Greg Guillot, a ground controller from Luke AFB, Arizona. "Not only do we get to see the pilots, but they get to see us. We are normally a faceless voice on the radio. Aircrews show up, check in during the mission, and then say 'good job' afterwards. Even if we didn't do a good job, saying we did is easier than giving constructive criticism. Here, pilots are forced to consider what our limitations are, what a ten-second sweep on the radar can do. I don't think they had to consider that before."

"Unless we're stationed with other aircraft, this is one of the few places where we'll have any contact with them unless we're in a major exercise," says Bernier, who rarely sees fighter aircraft at his B-52 base in South Dakota. "It's tough to get a face-to-face debrief with other airframes. They are just not located together. We won't find the exposure to other weapons as great as it is here anywhere else, especially during the mission employment phase."

Working together provides side benefits. "It is important for our graduates to walk out of here knowing how to build a composite strike package, how to use other capabilities to enhance their own situational awareness," says Dingee. "For a number of reasons, including a shrinking defense budget, we may not have enough F-15s to get the job done. So aircraft have to work together. We're finding out that this cooperation makes us a more potent force as well."

Through the years, the weapons school has adjusted to the larger needs of the Air Force. These adjustments are evidenced not only by the aircraft on the ramp but also by the syllabus, number of instructors and students, new divisions, course materials, and countless other items that constitute a school. 'We have been influenced by a lot of things,"

Rayburn explains. 'The Gulf War changed the way we operate to some extent. We now teach more night operations and concentrate more on precision-guided munitions. We have always been sensitive to the field and relevant to what they need. The concepts of battle management, command and control, and intelligence data collection have changed. J-Stars, for example, will do for the air-to-ground war what AWACS did for the air-to-air war." J-Stars is a Boeing 707 that carries an advanced synthetic aperture radar below its fuselage. The aircraft can detect, locate, track, and classify enemy ground formations at a long range.)

"The Air Force talks a lot about integrating airpower," Rayburn continues. "We're not quite there yet. We do a superb job of coordinating airpower. We integrate it to a degree, but we need to take more steps in that direction. The collective works more effectively, but it is more complex. Chances are that someone wearing one of our patches will perform a major role in working through those complexities."