Adversaries On Demand

Hot off the wire from the world of flight

AIRBORNE TACTICAL Advantage Company (ATAC) of Newport News, Virginia, is one of a rare new breed of private companies that offer their services in an arena that, until recently, at least in the USA, was the province of the military. ATAC provides high-performance adversary support for tactical training. Equipped with two ex-Danish AF RF-35 Drakens and five freshly reconditioned ex-Israeli AF Kfir F-21s, the company has contracts with the U.S. Navy and Air Force to play a number of adversarial support roles. ATAC's aircraft fly as an "Orange Air" force and simulate air-to-air, air-to-ship and air-to-ground threats primarily for USN and USAF units.

Retired Air Force fighter pilots Jeff Parker (ATAC president) and Larry Payne (VP) formed the company in 1994 to fill the niche created by the elimination of most of the USAF and USN's aggressor units in the early 1990s. Since then, ATAC has participated in joint exercises and adversarial training missions, including East Coast USN JTFXs (Joint Task Force Exercise), USAF JCIET (Joint Combat Identification Evaluation) exercises, USN "sustainment" training, SFARP (air-to-air adversarial training) missions with Navy aggressor squadron VFC-12 serving in the VID (visual identification) role and U.S. Joint Forces Command training exercises with naval units from other countries.

ATAC's Kfirs and Drakens are the highest performance tactical aircraft in the private adversary business; they carry AN/ALQ-167 jamming pods and AST-6 threat-simulation pods that mimic air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles. The pods and the F-21s' and RF-35s' supersonic performance make them singularly effective adversaries.

-Jan Tegler

Copyright Air Age Publishing Aug 2004
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