Campaign Introduction

by Steve Davies
www.10percenttrue.com
 Campaign Introduction

Introduction
“Great excitement at the depot! A Fokker had been captured undamaged”, wrote Cecil Lewis in
his 1936 book, Sagittarius Rising.
Lewis, one of the world’s first fighter pilots and a WWI Ace to boot, continued “Early in 1916, the
Fokker was the menace of the R.F.C [Royal Flying Corps] … Hearsay and a few lucky
encounters had made the machine respected, not to say dreaded. “

IWM Q 58660 “A sort of mystery surrounded the Fokker. Nobody

knew whether it had a stationary or a rotary engine.
Few attacked by it had come back to tell the tale; but
one pilot had seen a long black block of cylinder heads
nestling along the cowling; it must have been a
stationary engine… rumour credited it with the most
fantastic performance! It could outclimb, outpace and
outmanouver anything in the R.F.C…”
For the first time, Lewis had articulated what
generations of fighter pilots to follow would know to be
true: understanding your enemy’s capabilities is
critical if you are to beat him. In the absence of such knowledge, rumour and speculation
abound.
In 1916, the most enigmatic ‘enemy’ for Allied fighter pilots was “the Fokker”, but more
enigmatic “menaces” would follow in each generation that followed. In the 1940s, numerous
Axis fighters, bombers and the first jet fighters caused endless speculation among Allied pilots;
in 1951 over Korea the MiG-15 became the bogey man, and through the 1970s, the MiG-21,
MiG-23 and MiG-25 all created a sense of the unknown. Finally, as the Cold War thawed in the
late 1980s, the MiG-29 and Su-27 became the objects of attention. But regardless of the
menace or decade in question, one thing held true: in each instance, intelligence estimates of
the capabilities of the aircraft proved to be inaccurate, and sometimes wildly so.
And so, acquiring – by hook or by crook – an example of ‘the threat’ would reveal its secrets and
deliver such dividends as to be incalculable in value.
Lewis recalls how the captured Fokker gave up its secrets both on the ground and in the air.
What was believed to be a “cylinder block” actually turned out to be the cooling apparatus for a
machine gun, and the aircraft was powered by a rotary engine, not a stationary, inline engine.
In the air, pitted against a Morane Bullet, the Fokker was bested in every aspect – climb, speed,
manoeuvrability – and with that, the anecdotal reports of its superiority were debunked.
Crucially, in one short session of air combat between Fokker and Bullet, the morale and mental
wellbeing of the R.F.C. pilots improved – exploiting the enemy’s equipment hands you just as
much of an emotional and psychological advantage as a technical one. For Lewis, the impact
was as palpable as it was instant: “A cheer went up from the ground. The bogey was laid.”
With the revelations to hand, the next imperative was to share them: in the days that followed,
detailed technical reports on the Fokker were circulated across R.F.C. squadrons.

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After the World Wars

The effort to exploit enemy equipment – today known as Foreign Military Exploitation (FME) –
gained momentum with each passing decade.
Both Axis and Allies flew and exploited captured examples of each other’s aircraft during WWII,
and during the Korean war America offered a generous cash reward for the first pilot to defect
from North Korea to the south – the
result, late in the war, was the ‘Kimpo
MiG’, a single MiG-15 that was
thoroughly exploited and allowed
revised tactics to be developed for
Allied fighter pilots, paving the way
for further increases in their kill
ratios.
But for the West, the Vietnam war
saw the tide turn. In the skies over
USAF
Photo South East Asia, Americans were
paying the ultimate price for strategic
decisions made around aircraft design and operational doctrine – radar guided missiles and
beyond visual range combat, it turned out, were not going to replace the gun or close in basic
fighter manouvering, or the tactics that had been instilled in the likes of Cecil almost half a
century prior.
Russian designed, built and supplied MiG-17s and MiG-21s, were perfect for the North
Vietnamese Air Force. Built simply, and equipped with basic weaponry, they were flown to their
strengths and were outperforming American F-4 Phantom IIs and F-105 Thunderchiefs – hailed
widely as ‘superior’ American jet fighters.
Between 1965 and 1973, American airpower averaged a meagre 2.2:1 kill ratio over the North
Vietnamese Air Force. Things had to change.
Some of those who survived the experience and rotated Stateside took it upon themselves to
initiate programmes that would drive that change.
Of these, three are particularly well known: Top Gun, the world-famous US Navy Fighter
Weapons School; the US Air Force’s Red Flag combat training exercise; and the Air Force’s
Aggressor squadrons. The former programme alone resulted in the US Navy’s kill ratio rising
from 7:1 to 11:1.
Red Flag came in 1975 - too late to impact the Vietnam air war, but it served to expose new
pilots to the rigours of their first ten combat missions, ensuring that when they went into combat
for real, the rookie mistakes would have already been made, but made over the military ranges
of Nevada, and in the face not of real surface to air missiles, but SAM simulators known as
Smokey Sams. In other words, life savings lessons would already be engrained in their minds
and muscle memory. From the outset, Red Flag delivered a realistic training environment to the
war fighter that had been so lacking just a few years before.

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As for the Aggressors, the idea was simple: stand up a handful of squadrons that would
replicate the enemy – his mindset, his tactics, his aircraft and weapons – and travel around the
world teaching the Tactical Air Force how to fight and win against him.
The T-38 was initially chosen to replicate the most important threat of the time, the MiG-21
FISHBED, on account of the striking similarities in performance and size. But how was this
known? The initial cadre of Aggressor instructor pilots had a very special secret… since late
1972, they’d been flying the MiG-21 themselves. They knew exactly what it could do.

USAF Photo

MiGs at Groom
As the Vietnam conflict had progressed, the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division (FTD – the
forerunner to today’s National Air and Space Intelligence Centre) had continued to exploit small
numbers of defected MiGs. American pilots flew defected MiG-17s in Cambodia. Iran invited an
American pilot to fly an Iraqi Su-7 that had defected.
But Israel, a close collaborator and great source of FME “assets” of both air and ground
varieties, had delivered the ace card and provided America with two MiG-17s and a MiG-21F in
1968 and 1969.
Codenamed HAVE DRILL, HAVE FERRY and HAVE DOUGHNUT, a very select group of
American pilots had flown these assets in complete secrecy at Groom Lake. In fact, one had
already flown the MiG-21 in Israel before it was shipped to the United States.
Broadly, the DRILL, FERRY and DOUGHNUT exploitations had taken two main forms: technical
and tactical. In technical exploitations, the assets were flown in very prescriptive setups to
establish their performance envelope and capabilities.

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In the tactical exploitations, they were manouvered relative to other aircraft, also known as
Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT), to determine which tactics were best for defeating the
type in question.
In the same way as the RFC had
circulated reports of the Fokker’s true
capabilities in 1916, American fighter
squadrons now started receiving
enigmatic intelligence reports that
detailed exactly what the two MiGs
were capable of.
The first Top Gun classes had flown
against FERRY, DRILL and
USAF Photo
DOUGHNUT. Some of the Top Gun
instructors had flown the MiGs. With the
first graduates of the school returning to the fleet and to South East Asia immediately after, the
Navy’s jump in kill ratio came about, at least in part, as a result.
The Air Force’s Aggressor pilots had flown, or flown against, them too.
But the opportunities to fly or fight against the MiGs were few and far between on account of the
very small number of assets available, and the exceptional secrecy that surrounded them.
Now, in the mid-1970s, it looked like the numbers – if not the secrecy – were about to change
for the better.
For the first time ever, a nation was acquiring enough threat aircraft to be able to stand up an
entire squadron.
The Red Eagles were about to be born.

HAVE IDEA and all things Red

By the time 1977 rolled by, the CIA had been operating covertly in Indonesia for almost two
decades.
Their objective – to turn Indonesia away from its communist ties with Russia – had had been
met, and in time the country had secretly handed over examples of Russian made air defence
equipment to the United States.
Importantly, America’s FME activities were by this time more ambitious and further reaching
than at any time in the Cold War.
The Air Force’s exploitations had been conducted under the umbrella programme HAVE GLIB
from 1970, but by 1973 MiG exploitations were growing in number sufficiently enough for them
to dovetail out from the other exploitations and would all henceforth be conducted under their
own umbrella programme: HAVE IDEA.

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In the Pentagon, meanwhile, Air Force Officers knew of the impending wholesale acquisition of
Indonesia’s derelict MiG-21F-13 FISHBED C/Es and a handful of MiG-17s, some of which had
been sitting in ditches for years, and none of which were currently in airworthy condition.
These Officers also knew that the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) was negotiating with Egypt
to acquire 13 of its MiG-23 FLOGGERS. Their acquisition for IDEA was a tantalising prospect
but returning them to flight would be an undertaking of significant proportions. The reward,
though, would be worth it.
In 1973, the Air Force was operating a meagre two FISHBED C/Es and two FRESCO C/Ds, so
the forthcoming Indonesian and Egyptian acquisitions meant that things were about to scale up
dramatically!
Although IDEA provided the Air Force with administrative management of the assets, the
anticipated arrival of more than 20 MiGs from Indonesia and Egypt meant that the Air Force’s
discrete operations through the Air Force Flight Test Centre at Edwards Air Force Base would
no longer suffice.
Two new units were therefore stood up in early 1977 to operate the assets.
The lead unit was the Red Hats (6513th Test Squadron), an Air Force Systems Command
(AFSC) unit that had overall ownership of many of the assets through GLIB and IDEA. The Red
Hats flew the technical exploitations.
The second unit was the Red Eagles (4477th Test and Evaluation Flight – later, Squadron), a
Tactical Air Command (TAC) unit that flew the operational, tactical exploitations.
The programme name for exposing the TAF to the assets was CONSTANT PEG, and until this
programme started, TAC played second fiddle to AFSC, and had to jump through a range of
administrative hoops to get some playtime with the assets.
That was all about to change.
Both units were initially located a Groom Lake, but the Red Eagles would eventually relocate to
the spartan Tonopah Test Range airfield in the north-west corner of the Nellis range complex.

USAF Photo In fact, the clandestine unit’s move was a

wonderful example of hiding a secret
within a secret. It allowed the expansion
and modernisation of TTR, and in doing
so provided deep cover for an even more
classified programme, SENIOR TREND –
better known as the F-117 Nighthawk
stealth fighter.
While Tonopah underwent development,
the colossal task of making the MiGs
airworthy began.
A tight group of the Air Force’s most
talented maintainers were plucked from

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IDEA and assigned to the Red Eagles. They grew beards, stopped cutting their hair, and took
on the look of civilians, then they travelled to Indonesia on ‘extractions’, carefully selecting
airframes, engines, spare parts and ground support equipment to be loaded on a C-5 Galaxy
and then be flown back to Groom.
Defence contractors were in-briefed into the programme, and reverse engineering began in
earnest – engines, brake pads, canopies, pyrotechnic charges for the ejection seats, and so on
were all manufactured in secret.
With a lot of sweat, hard work and ingenuity, the MiGs were made ready for flight.
The first still boasted a waterline in the cockpit from where it had sat semi-submerged in an
Indonesian swamp.
It was Summer 1977.

Exposing the Tactical Air Forces

When enough FISHBEDs and FRESCOs were available, the first exposures were flown from
Groom Lake as a very secret part of Red Flag.
And so, a select group of visiting F-4 pilots became the first of around 1,600 aircrew who would
eventually be exposed to the 4477th’s assets.
In doing so, they got to experience ‘buck fever’ – the deer in the headlights reaction that can
happen when a person encounters the enemy for the first time - in the safety of the Nellis
ranges.
As one Red Eagle put it: “Once they got over the thrill of being five feet away from a MiG-21 in
flight, the learning began… We felt that we had made an unbelievably significant impact on the
combat capability of every one of those pilots. When I was flying over Hanoi I saw MiGs and
USAF Photo
they held for me the fear of the unknown.
They had that mystique that made them
bigger than life. But for these guys we had
just trained, they knew what it looked like
up close, they knew how to pressure a MiG
into making fatal errors; there was no
mystique, there was only a Bogie who
would easily become a Bandit, then a
target, and then a kill”.
In Summer 1978, the first actual
CONSTANT PEG exposures – where a unit
was invited to Nellis to fly against the MiGs
– took place. Six 49th TFW pilots came to
Nellis. The squadron, equipped with the Air Force’s newest fighter – the F-15A Eagle –
deployed to Nellis for what they had been told were “advanced air-to-air tactics” sorties, but
there was little other detail.

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The Eagle drivers flew to Nellis on a Sunday afternoon and were briefed on CONSTANT PEG.
Only then was the detail revealed: the 4477th TEF instructed the F-15 Eagles to focus on
employing their AIM-9P Sidewinders against the MiGs to see how vulnerable the assets were.
The tests of the AIM-9P would provide a baseline from which to establish how much more lethal
the newest version of the Sidewinder missile, the AIM-9L, was. The FWS would be called upon
by the 4477th TEF to conduct similar tests of the newer version of the missile.
To make the analysis realistic, the Holloman-based Eagle pilots were told: “There are no
training rules. Just make sure you don’t crash.” For two to three weeks the Eagles flew 2 v 2
sorties against the MiGs several times a day. Occasionally, a “neutral” Aggressor T-38 would fly
in among the assets to create a 3 v 2 scenario, where the Eagle pilots had to be sure not to
shoot the Talon. Likewise, the rules on when the Sidewinder could be employed throughout the
tests were varied to further challenge the pilots.

USAF Photo
With the radar-less MiGs’ heavy
dependency on GCI apparent, the
Eagles would fly low to the ground
and below the coverage of the GCI
radars; since there was no minimum
height restriction, this was perfectly
legal. The tactic blinded the MiGs at
long range, and forced the 4477th
TEF pilots to rely on their “Mk I
eyeballs” to pick up a visual on the
Eagles. More often than not, the F-
15s were already converting on the
MiGs’ sterns and locking their
Sidewinders onto their hot jet pipes
before they knew what was
happening.
When the assets were flown in a mixed force of MiG-21s and MiG-17s, the Holloman flyers tried
first to kill the faster FISHBED, which could accelerate almost as well as the dual-engine F-15.
They avoided turning with the agile, but comparatively slow, FRESCO.

Performance Profiles
On July 17, 1979, MiG operations at Tonopah began.
In the days before, six MiG-21s and two MiG-17s had been flown in from Groom Lake.
Coordinating the first operational squadron exposures was a matter of identifying units that were
coming in to participate in Red Flag, or that were deployed in specifically for CONSTANT PEG.
In the case of the former, a squadron would deploy to Nellis with absolutely no idea that they
were going to do anything other than Red Flag. However, for the duration of the two-week
exercise, two or three pilots per day would be taken off the flying schedule and told instead to
report to another building on the Nellis compound for some unspecified training. In the case of

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the latter, the squadron would usually send a small cadre of six aircraft and as many as eight
pilots.
The Blue Air pilots, no doubt mystified, would arrive at the 4477th TEF’s plain white trailer vans
located in the Fighter Weapons School parking lot, away from the main hub of flying operations.
There they would be greeted by one or two unfamiliar pilots wearing the yellow and black
checked scarves of the Nellis elite beneath the collars of their flight suits, and on their left
shoulders was a circular patch depicting a Soviet-styled red eagle with wings spreading either
side of a white five-point star. In red at the bottom of the circle were the numbers and letters
“4477th TEF.” At the top was written “Red Eagles.”

USAF Photo

The Blue Air pilots would be seated in a small briefing room in the trailers and were finally read
into the CONSTANT PEG program. “They had the fear of God hammered into them,” recalled
the second Red Eagles’ commander, Gail “Evil” Peck. “We left them in no doubt that that any
divulgence of the program’s secrets would be dealt with in the most severe of ways.” The Red
Eagle pilots would brief them, usually in small groups of two or four, about what they were going
to see the next day, how the sorties were going to be sequenced, and what would be
demonstrated airborne.
The next morning the Red Eagles pilots left Nellis early, arriving at TTR at break of dawn. As the
first two Blue Air pilots briefed the sortie at Nellis and stepped to their jets for take-off, the two
Bandit pilots would be getting ready to man the MiGs. Approaching the airfield at a prearranged
time, and broadcasting their position on the Red Eagle’s radio frequency, the Blue Air pilots
would announce their imminent arrival. As the Blue Air fighters arrived overhead, the MiGs
would take off.
A record of each pilot to undergo exposure to the MiGs was filed at Tonopah, allowing it to
determine who had received what training, and against which aircraft, for future reference. This

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was critical because not only was it desired that the Red Eagles expose as many frontline
fighter pilots as possible, but also because each pilot could participate in three different types of
exposure with each MiG type during the course of his career.
The three-stage exposure program applied now differed in its overall aggression and tone to
that which had been flown prior to the arrival of the MiGs at Tonopah. Whereas the exposures
prior to September 1979 had essentially gone straight for the kill with the dogfighting on the first
sortie and 2 v 2 or even 4 v 2 on the third sortie, the new regime took a more gradual approach.
Stage one, the first exposure, incorporated a performance profile (PP), followed by a brief stint
of basic fighter maneuvers at the end if fuel allowed.
The PP constituted the new, more gentle introduction to the MiGs and would often start with an
interception using the visiting pilot’s radar, followed by a visual join up. “You’d be there in this
little biddy MiG-17, with your head sticking out above the canopy rail, and the guy’s eyes would
just about pop out of his head as he joined up with you in formation,” Peck chuckled.
The PP had actually been devised in late 1967 by Maj Duke Johnston, the chief of air-to-air at
the F-4 FWS at the time, and the man who had been selected by TAC to be the project pilot for
operational exploitation of HAVE DOUGHNUT. Johnston had devised the profile around key
criteria that would demonstrate how one aircraft performed compared to another, and it was a
scripted precursor to engaging the DOUGHNUT MiG in unscripted dogfights. It had since been
adopted by test pilot schools and follow-on foreign military exploitation (FME) programs alike.
The PP started with the Red Eagle instructing his adversary to take up various formations,
according to the pre-briefed flow, so that he could show the MiG’s strengths and weaknesses in
direct comparison to the visitor’s mount. “I’d tell him to look at me from various angles, and then
I’d tell him that we were going to have a
race,” Peck remembered. In order to
demonstrate the relative differences in
acceleration, both aircraft would go to
afterburner and accelerate to 500 knots.
Then the PP would become more
involved. Against an F-4 pilot, for
example: “We would have him fly
formation with us and then tell him we
were about to do our best sustained turn.
His job was to follow us. Well, he
couldn’t, because the turn circle in the F-
4 would just puke through. The lesson
USAF Photo
there for the F-4 guy is that if he wants to
fight a MiG-17, he can’t turn with him. If
the MiG-17 turns, then he has to go up to become like a stitch in a sewing machine, riding his
turn circle every time the MiG starts to turn. Maneuvering into the vertical to stay within the
same plane (arc) as the MiG’s turn was the only way to do it.”
There were of course rules, but these were standard Air Force training rules, according to Jose
Oberle, one of the earliest 4477th TEF pilots: “We had a 5,000ft floor AGL [above ground level],
a 1,000ft bubble around each airplane that you weren’t to penetrate, and the idea was not to get

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into a slow-speed rat race but to try to learn to maintain your energy and fly the strength of your
airplane against the weakness of the MiGs.”
Teaching pilots who’d never flown against the MiG-17 was an exciting experience for Peck, and
it wouldn’t take long for the Phantom driver to truly recognize that the excess thrust he had in
comparison to the tiny MiG could be used to counter the Fresco’s exceptional turn capability.
Sortie number two saw a continuation of BFM. The Red Eagle pilot would invite the visitor to
“take up a perch”, which is to position themselves a set distance (usually 6,000ft) away so that
they could do some basic BFM. As the opposition pilot’s proficiency increased, the MiG would
be flown in a correspondingly tighter turn to challenge them and get them used to it. That would
be followed by a defensive perch, said Peck: “He would go out in front and we would show him
how difficult it was to see a MiG at your six while pulling 5G.” For Peck this lesson was one of
the most valuable: “We were using to looking at the gigantic planforms with smoking engines,
and suddenly we’re teaching these guys to look for canopy glints and things like that. If a MiG is
converting to your 6 o’clock, a canopy glint may be all that you see because he’s pointing at you
the whole time and his visual cross section is tiny.”

By the time the visiting pilot was receiving his third exposure, he would be told to execute
“butterfly” set-ups – where the two fighters would line-up side by- side and then turn into each
other and pass canopy to canopy; they then fought to see who could gain the tactical
advantage.
After this, more tactical radar intercepts would be flown, provided there was enough gas
remaining. The intercepts allowed the pilots to see the ranges that the Soviet jets would appear
on radar, and to see what the electronic indications that the MiGs’ own range only gun radar
would look like and sound like on a radar warning receiver.
For the Red Eagle pilot, a typical day would produce two MiG sorties, following which he flew
back down to Nellis to individually debrief the men he had flown against. As more pilots qualified
to fly the MiGs, A rota system was developed to allow a pilot to spend one day at Nellis
debriefing the visiting pilots he had flown against the day before, then briefing the pilots he was

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to fly against the next day. That night, or early the next morning, he would fly up to Tonopah and
spend the whole day there.
The next day the process would repeat.
Although two types of MiG and three sorties per MiG resulted in the maximum number of sorties
per Blue Air pilot being limited to just six, few actually experienced that many. For a pilot
attending Red Flag, he would be fortunate to fly three sorties against the MiGs on the day he
had been taken off the normal flying schedule. The next day he was back onto the Red Flag
schedule and two other pilots from his squadron would be whisked away for the day.
There were exceptions to that rule, and some squadrons visiting Red Flag would use their two-
seat trainers to make sure that as many pilots as possible got exposed to the program before
their visit to Nellis was over. In reality, it took two or three days to get a single pilot through the
entire exposure program, and weather aborts and maintenance aborts by either party would
mean that that sortie was lost forever – it was not rescheduled, it was tough luck.
A number of factors influenced the small number of sorties available. The first was that the fuel
fraction of the MiGs – the amount of time they could remain airborne – was exceptionally short
and this limited the amount of “playtime” that each MiG would have; and the second was that
with the almost certain shock of buck fever that the visiting pilots would experience on first
sighting the MiGs, the first exposure would be spent helping them to pull their jaws from the
depths of the cockpit floors. In this sense, CONSTANT PEG would work along similar lines to
Red Flag, allowing the pilots, astonished by what they were seeing, the luxury of becoming
accustomed to the MiGs before they finally realized that there was nothing magical about them
– they were simply other jets.

USAF Photo

The End
By the mid-1980s, the Red Eagles were increasing their value to the TAF by participating in
training outside of the original scope of CONSTANT PEG.
The best example of this was the last ride in a FWS student’s syllabus. The Mission
Employment (ME) ride combined everything that had been taught into one sortie that they were
expected to plan, brief, lead, and debrief to the exacting standards of their IPs. Passing the

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course and becoming a FWS graduate depended on this sortie going well; if it did not, they
would flunk the course regardless of how well they had performed to date.
Crucially, there were few rules during ME and once either a Blue Air or Red Air player was
called “killed”, he returned directly base – there were no second chances or regeneration.
The 4477th TES made themselves available to the FWS, and so its students and their IPs
would fly up to the range space near Tonopah to tangle with the MiGs. The rules were simple:
“minimum altitude of 100 feet, and don’t hit each other or the ground”.
Eventually, the Red Eagles started flying in Red Flag “Large Force Exercises.” This meant that
two four-ships would launch to meet waves of Red Flag participants either as they arrived for
their two-week deployment, or at some point towards the end of the deployment.
Despite the increased integration of CP into the wider range of training activities conducted out
of Nellis and Fallon, the programme was entering its final days. Budget constraints and
questions about whether the MiG-21 and MiG-23 really provided the level of adversary training
that was needed at a time when the MiG-29 and Su-27 were the opponents to watch, all had an
impact on the decision to end things. Thus, on Friday March 4, 1988, the 4477th TES flew its
last ever CONSTANT PEG sorties, ending the day with an all-time contribution of 15,264 MiG
sorties.
CP remained SECRET//SCI//NOFORN until its formal declassification in 2006. It was one of the
most successful classified programmes in the history of the US Air Force… of the ones we know
about!

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The CONSTANT PEG experience in DCS

We have worked hard to bring you a realistic and engaging CONSTANT PEG experience within
the confines of the DCS simulation.
Some simplification of the mission briefing process, and obvious limitations in the Wingman AI
and the types of aircraft available to fly mean that some unavoidable compromises have been
made. But the missions, the experience and the background information for this campaign are
heavily imbued real-life recollections and inputs of the Red Eagles pilots themselves.
We hope that you enjoy it.

For video of the actual CONSTANT PEG programme, see: America's Secret MiG Pilots React to
Unseen CONSTANT PEG Footage - 4477th TES Red Eagles - YouTube

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About the creators:

Rob McCray: retired from the US Air Force after 20 years of service as an aircraft armament
systems craftsman on aircraft like the F-16C, F-117A and F-22A. He is an avid researcher and
aircraft restoration volunteer, having provided support to museums and organizations
throughout the US southwest.
This is his fifth DCS campaign, in addition to providing mission and training content for several
recent DCS aircraft releases.

Steve Davies: runs the 10 Percent True aviation podcast (www.10percenttrue.com) as a hobby
and is a former aerospace and defence photojournalist. In 2006, he wrote the best-selling book
“Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs” and penned 16 critically acclaimed books before growing
up and getting a real job.
This is his second collaborative DCS campaign, having previously worked with Rob and Matt
Wagner, delivering the campaign outline, mission briefings and narratives and for the DCS: Red
Flag 16-2 campaigns.

We would like to thank the voice actors who provided their valuable assistance in making these
missions come alive:
Kirk 'Dooom' Lange
Matt ‘Wags’ Wagner
Michael ‘Overkill’ Fredona
Rob ‘Crash’ Trask
Kevin Bryan
Jack ‘Habu’ Spencer

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