Lt. Col. Anthony "Stash" Buck is the Commander of the US Air Force’s POLYGONE EW range, which is part of the Warrior Preparation Centre located near the Ramstein base in Germany. He talks through a few of the aspects that concern him in this field.

1. Airborne Electronic Warfare training across the Atlantic
Lt. Col. Anthony Buck is the Commander of the US Air Force’ POLYGONE EW range,
which is part of the Warrior Preparation Centre located near the Ramstein base in Germany.
He talks through a few of the aspects that concern him in this field, before delivering his
seminar in September.
Defence IQ: I’m interested to hear, first of all, as I’m sure many of our listeners are, just what
the Warrior Prep Centre is all about; how the POLYGONE EW range fits into that, and what
the chief aims are for this particular division.
Buck: Okay, well, the Warrior Preparation Centre is a wing organisation that answers directly
to the United States Air Forces in Europe Headquarters. Their vision is to provide innovative,
realistic warfighting training in Europe, and this warfighting training is not just for United
States air forces in Europe, but it also involves our NATO partners, coalition partners;
anybody in the area in Europe, basically. Their mission is to create, support and sustain the
realistic war fighting training opportunities within the European continent. Really, the goal
there is to provide certified, standardised and credible JTAC training, enhanced theatre pre-
deployment training for those units going downrange, to build NATO tactical air force
capability, and to present a theatre-wide exercise support base for joint task force training, air
forces training, and air and space operation centre – or AOC – training. Dept 3 here at
POLYGONE EW range, is one of five different detachments of the Warrior Preparation
Centre, and our piece of the pie is to provide the physical location for, mostly for live training,
EW training, in Europe. We are the only EW training facility on the continent of Europe, so we
get a lot of customers from Germany, France, and the surrounding area here.
Defence IQ: We’ll take a look at that topic now. I gather that most EW simulators for air
crews are now reaching the end of their lifespan, but there are few, if any, credible
alternatives to replace them. How is the Air Force looking to overcome this problem, sir?
Buck: Yes, that’s a good point. Our simulators are reaching the end of their life cycle. Our
current simulators had a life cycle out to about the 2015 time frame, and there is currently a
study going on…they were just over here in Europe from the States, talking with some of our
German counterparts. The study is trying to decide, or trying to determine whether it is more
cost effective to go with live system capabilities; the former Soviet Union emitters, etc, or to
continue down the path of creating a follow on simulator, or a series of simulators, to provide
EW training of the future. What we’ve seen so far is that for the current simulators that we
have in the inventory, there has been a life cycle extension for those simulators, anywhere
from five to eight years beyond their current life cycle, and this is just a commitment to
maintain support for those simulators while this study is going on, and while the follow on next

2. generation simulator development is in process. We think that by the year 2015 we’re going to
have a good idea on whether we’re going to focus on more live systems, or continue on the
development of the next gen simulator to make sure that we have that training capability for
the out years in follow and forces.
Defence IQ: And in terms of importance, without this system in place, how exactly do you
think that would impact the advancement for future operations?
Buck: That’s a good question too. Around the tactical air forces – the combat air forces of
the United States anyway – our EW training capability, as we get closer and closer to the end
of our life cycle on simulators, it really causes a problem for the smaller – what we call,
backyard – ranges, that are associated with many of the wings throughout the United States.
Those smaller backyard ranges, the EW training capability on those ranges will pretty much
grind to a halt. There’ll be a consolidation of assets from these smaller ranges to the larger
big three to five ranges, Nellis being one of those. And that’s going to increase our reliance on
live systems as well, because the bigger ranges do have some live capability. What’s this
going to mean to the impact on training funds and what-not? It’s going to increase our costs
dramatically; maintenance is going to obviously go up as we extend life cycles and the
equipment gets older and older. There is going to be an increased cost in TDYs for units
getting ready to deploy, that need to update their EW training currencies. Instead of having
those backyard ranges with EW capability, they’re going to have to deploy to one of the larger
ranges and get their EW training there before they deploy overseas. So, it’s going to end up
costing us; there’s going to be a consolidation within the EW training capability community,
and it’s going to end up costing us more in maintenance and travel for units to get their
currencies updated.
Defence IQ: Clearly a priority to get the system up and running then. Just stepping away
from the simulator dilemma for now, sir, and looking at general training – what recent
examples could you perhaps provide us on the operational feedback that you’ve received that
has helped you to shape how you actually instruct EW aircraft operators today?
Buck: Our training capability here at POLYGONE is really, has been focused on fighter
aircraft. We have been, over the last year or two, we’ve been getting a lot more training
requests for helicopters and tactical airlift aircraft; those platforms that are seeing more and
more work over down in the AOR. The requirement has forced us to focus on the less
technical threats, such as the man pads, or the surface to air missiles that are infrared guided,
man-portable; so we’ve been using one of our systems much more lately. It’s a system that is
developed and produced out of the UK actually, it’s called Malina; and it’s an IR/UV
stimulator. And it is really used to simulate those low tech surface to air missiles that could be
man-portable, and could be very dangerous down in the AOR today. We are also looking at
expanding our training capability to include those C2ISR type platforms, the bigger platforms
that are doing a lot of work in the AOR right now. The problem that we’re seeing as far as
operational utilisation on the range, is that with the ops tempo that’s going on right now, as
well as several of the national draw-downs of air forces in Europe, to include the US Air Force
footprint here in Europe, we’re seeing less utilisation from the fighter aircraft, and increased
utilisation from helicopters and the tactical airlift.
Defence IQ: Very interesting, thank you. And in examining the double digit threat – that
being the sophisticated new generation surface to air missiles – what are the overall
strategies in tackling these weapons in particular, from a simulation perspective? And how
much has this approach advanced, or indeed, what plans do the US Air Force have for further
advancement?
Buck: I can speak to this from a training capability perspective, in that we’ve had a couple
of…in the States we’ve had a…there were a couple of pedestals that were developed,
designed and produced, to simulate a double digit threat. And those two pedestals have
basically been in maintenance for the last four years since they’ve been introduced. They’ve
had a lot of issues with their emitting the correct signals, and their capabilities in, over the
long term being reliable enough to produce those signals for any kind of training capability in
a sustained environment. Right now the production line, it’s basically been halted on those,

3. and they’re re-looking at whether or not to continue with a enhance/upgraded version of those
pedestals, or to go in a different direction as far as maybe re-thinking whether we use more
live systems, former Soviet Union systems, or we continue along the path with the next
generation simulators that will include the double digit capability.
In the States, we found that the double digit training has really morphed to be not so
applicable to our everyday forces that the standard fighter aircraft and better aircraft that may
be flying in area of operation today. It’s morphed into more of a fifth generation training
requirement, and the stealth technology has been important in the development of tactics and
take down capability of the double digit SAM. So, that being said, there’s not a lot that we can
really talk about in this venue, but I will say that there have been, and continue to be, a lot of
questions asked about double digit training capability, not only from the US side, but from our
NATO partners as well as other coalition partners, and how we’re going to tackle that animal
as we’re faced with it in the future.
Defence IQ: I’m sure it will come up in the conference. Other than the topics we’ve
discussed here, what aspects of this field are you most looking to gain some insight into at the
event? What are the key concerns our delegates should be discussing from your point of
view?
Buck: Well, from my point of view, I am hoping that – and I’m going to bring some of this up
during my presentation – I’m hoping that there is a concerted effort across the NATO forces
as well as individual country forces, that folks are starting to look at the live virtual
constructive training capability, and look at it in a way of making sure that we are
standardising across the board as far as NATO investigates the LVC training capability. It’s
critically important that a standard be developed and adapted so that individual efforts are
interoperable and compatible with each other, so that we can have a European training
capability across the board. This will lead to far more efficient and cost effective development
of the LVC training capability and it will lead to an increase in the training capability for each
of the individual countries as well. I think, just off the top of my head, a few things that
definitely need to be incorporated in the standardisation of this development, the development
of the training capability, is to make sure that we have a standard architecture that everybody
is basing their development on. And by this, I mean, right now we’ve noticed in the States –
and the LVC capability in the States is still fledgling – but we’ve been at it for now, probably
the last ten years or so, and really, the last five years have been pretty active. But we’ve
noticed that there are several different architectures out there that the different divisions of our
defence have been using, that are not compatible across the spectrum.
So, there’s been an architecture called TENA, which stands for Training Enabling Network
Architecture, which has been developed to kind of, bridge the gap between all these other
architectures, to make sure that each of the navy, air force, army systems can talk to each
other. It provides an architecture that’s standardised. I think as NATO investigates LVC, they
need to make sure that they identify an architecture and maybe piggyback on what we’re
doing over in the States on this, to make sure that everybody is designing their operations
around the architecture so that it’s all interoperable. Also, the multi-level security solutions
that allow each country to basically play within the architecture to its fullest capability, needs
to be common; it has to be; if there’s a bunch of different solutions out there, then as we
found in the States, it becomes costly in the long run, because we have to go back and fix
those incompatibilities. And then lastly, and probably most importantly, we need to make sure
that we have a standardised communications backbone that all of this architecture and
equipment will operate on. Right now, we have the range up in Sweden that has a very
pronounced backbone, communications backbone; we have the POLYGONE here in
Germany; we have Spadeadam in the UK; we need to make sure that we have compatible
architecture for the actual electrons to all run over and talk with each other. Those are just
some of the ideas that are really lessons that we’ve learned over in the States, that I’m hoping
that as NATO starts getting interested in the LVC training capability, that they take a good
hard look at before the development gets too far down the road.

4. Our 10th annual Airborne Electronic Warfare Conference takes place between
September 28-29 2011 in London. You can register through our website at
www.electronic-warfare.co.uk, e-mail enquire@defenceiq.com, or phone us on +44
(0)207 368 9300.
IQPC
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