Photo: USAF/Airman 1st Class Shelimar Rivera
If you really want to hone your combat skills, training ranges are the places for you. Granted, going to such a place is not actually a personal choice of a warrior, as it is dependent on orders coming from higher up the food chain, but the reality remains: training ranges are perfect for practicing warfare.
There are all kinds of such places spread throughout the planet, but none of them comes even close in size and scope to the Joint Pacific Alaskan Range Complex. JPARC for short, it covers a total of 67,000 square miles (174,000 km) and a variety of landscapes, from rivers to mountains and from forest to plains.
It is here where some of America’s largest military drills are held each year, and they involve soldiers working for the pretty much all branches of the American combat apparatus. Not only them, but also government and non-governmental agencies come to train in what the U.S. Air Force describes as “the world’s largest instrumented air, ground and electronic combat training range.“
It is somewhere over the vastness of the JPARC that the photo of this dead serious F-16 Fighting Falcon was captured, as the plane was taking part in exercise Red Flag-Alaska 22-1 in mid May.
Carrying missiles on its wing tips and external fuel tanks closer to the main fuselage, this plane is deployed with the 18th Aggressor Squadron based at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.
The profile of its mission during the said exercise is not public, but as some of you might already know, aggressor squadrons usually have one task: to become adversaries for USAF pilots, as they train for combat missions.
To make sure no one confuses them for friendlies, aggressor planes usually wear a different paint scheme compared to USAF machines, as clearly demonstrated by the pic we have here.
It is here where some of America’s largest military drills are held each year, and they involve soldiers working for the pretty much all branches of the American combat apparatus. Not only them, but also government and non-governmental agencies come to train in what the U.S. Air Force describes as “the world’s largest instrumented air, ground and electronic combat training range.“
It is somewhere over the vastness of the JPARC that the photo of this dead serious F-16 Fighting Falcon was captured, as the plane was taking part in exercise Red Flag-Alaska 22-1 in mid May.
Carrying missiles on its wing tips and external fuel tanks closer to the main fuselage, this plane is deployed with the 18th Aggressor Squadron based at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.
The profile of its mission during the said exercise is not public, but as some of you might already know, aggressor squadrons usually have one task: to become adversaries for USAF pilots, as they train for combat missions.
To make sure no one confuses them for friendlies, aggressor planes usually wear a different paint scheme compared to USAF machines, as clearly demonstrated by the pic we have here.
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