The Inspector wrote:
There were some Indian SU-30's @ mountain Home a few weeks ago on an exercise, they pretty much got their fannies wiped by some 'Artic Foxes'
It's impossible to draw any conclusions like that from either the InAF's time at Mountain Home or Nellis.
The purpose of going to Mountain Home in the first place was simply to get them ready to fly and fight the following month at Nellis for Red Flag. It was what we call a "spin up", or a time of preparation for something big, like an exercise or deployment.
Since the airspace is so crowded at Red Flag, the "admin" of simply getting airplanes to and from the NTTR range is something that has to be executed
perfectly by the units playing in the exercise. Since airspace comms and procedures are different in India than they are in the US, the Indians needed an opportunity to get their bearings on how to fly in the US before they were thrown into the frying pan at Nellis.
Second, the "game play" at Red Flag -- in other words, the rules and standards that US and coalition forces use to simulate fights -- is also something that has to be known and executed perfectly by participating units. Squadrons have been sent home from Red Flag for being buffoons, and not knowing how to call shots in flight, how to assess kills in flight, and how to communicate that information to the "referees" who are watching the whole thing.
Even as someone who has been to Red Flag twice previously, I spend time studying the admin of flying to-and-from before I even go to Nellis. My squadron dedicates specific training at home practicing how to "play the game" both in flight and in the detailed post-flight debriefs before the trip to Nellis for the exercise. That way we don't end up looking like idiots in front of all the other assembled units at the exercise if we don't know what we're doing. It's a VERY big deal...a bigger deal even than the tactical success of what happens during the exercise.
So, the whole point of the Indians going to Mountain Home was to figure out the basics of how to operate and play at Red Flag. Anything "tactical" about their time there was completely secondary.
Saying they got their butts kicked ("fanny" means something completely different over here in the UK, so it's not a 'nice' substitute for butt) on their deployment to MHAFB is a little like saying a fooball team got beat when it was scrimmaging against the local rugby team in order to figure out how to play rugby.
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