Silver Flag: A Concept for Operational Warfare

WITH THE WAR on terrorism and homeland defense in full swing, along with many other national-defense challenges, the urgent but continuing need for effective education and training is enormous. wargaming can and should play an important role in that process.¹ Red Flag has become a monumental success in “training as we fight” at the tactical level, and we should capture the same visionary approach by using wargaming in education and training at the operational level of war (OPWAR). A Silver Flag, based on an effective use of wargaming, could complement our present Blue Flag exercises to round out an overall systemic approach to OPWAR. For nearly two centuries, wargames have proven vital in teaching military leadership how to think better—how to ask the right questions, how to anticipate, and how to adapt.² wargaming promotes understanding of the “operational art” of war. It provides experience in decision making. It makes book learning and classroom study come alive, reinforcing the lessons of history and illuminating the theories behind effective planning and execution. These tremendous benefits from wargaming, however, do not come without an investment that starts with recognition of the value of wargaming to professional military education (PME) and training as well as to military operations. This article promotes wargaming as an innovative tool for achieving successful war-fighting strategies. It shows how wargaming is an integral part of the “organize, train, and equip” mission of the ser-vice. It argues for a back-to-the-future focus on the human aspects of wargaming to enhance greater effectiveness in how the Air Force approaches wargaming today. Finally, it recognizes the need for improved organizational efficiencies in the service’s wargaming infrastructure to better meet current and future national-security needs.³ Historically and pragmatically, strong reasons exist for refocusing and refining our use of this invaluable tool in order to better plan and execute war.

One should not argue about whether wargaming represents education or training—or whether it is operational or analytical. It is all-inclusive. All tenets are instrumental in producing issues that prepare war fighters and planners to be good decision makers (fig. 1). Along with its supporting tools of modeling and simulation, wargaming teaches people to process issues more effectively in making good decisions. In that sense, the professional application of wargaming can span a broad spectrum of times, scenarios, and circumstances. No doubt, professional wargaming is a misnomer in that it reflects a very serious business. Considering it a luxury is foolish. Our military personnel and organizations must be well prepared, and wargaming can make the difference, in terms of decisive training and education, in leaders’ competence (or incompetence) in the heat of battle.

Issues developed from wargaming benefit war fighters via education, training, and analysis.

Figure 1. The Foundation of Decision Making

Figure 1. The Foundation of Decision Making

One finds many historical examples of wargaming’s contribution to successful strategies, operations, or tactics, and it is tempting to try to prove the value of gaming by pointing to direct causality between wargames and success in war. But that ploy, which constitutes an abuse or misuse of history, is not the purpose here.⁴ For one thing, historians can only guess as to how frequently and substantially previous wargaming experiences may have influenced wartime commanders’ decisions. The unrecorded continuity between wargaming and the thoughts of war-fighting commanders is immense. Nevertheless, one finds value in recognizing that wargaming has had a historically important influence on the operational art of war.

For example, the famous German offensive plan to envelop France at the start of the First World War was a fatally modified version of the so-called Schlieffen Plan, one originally influenced to a great extent by Prussian wargaming under Chief of the General Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen.⁵ Later in that same war, military-member representatives to the Allied Supreme War Council at Versailles, France, participated in a wargame, trying to anticipate the level of German success. Players representing the enemy (German) side wore their hats backwards as they accurately predicted the timing and location of Germany’s final major offensive.⁶ These examples were operationally oriented games designed to predict outcomes based on various strategies and force structures.

One may find another example, this one involving wargaming in an educational context, by examining the US Naval War College (NWC), where gaming became part of the school curriculum only three years after the school was founded at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1887. Lt (later Capt) William McCarty Little was the primary initiator of wargames at the NWC, but, for the most part, the institution’s leadership also enthusiastically embraced them as valuable educational tools and made them integral to the course of study. In particular, during his second term as college president, from 1918 to 1922, Adm William S. Sims believed that the primary purpose of the NWC was to provide realistic education—more practical than theoretical. The goal was to have students leave with the ability to command at sea—so they needed decision-making experience.⁷ Wargames helped provide exactly that. As a result, the college did not conduct just one capstone game a year to reinforce classroom teaching. It did lots of wargaming!

For example, between the First and Second World Wars, the NWC conducted more than 300 games, mostly with scenarios of blue versus orange fleets that usually involved conflict with Japan. Admittedly, people have made too much of the apocryphal remark attributed to Adm Chester Nimitz that no surprises occurred in the Second World War in the Pacific except the kamikazes.⁸ Obviously, disastrous “surprises” at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, for example, did not speak well for the fact that NWC wargaming had indeed explored such contingencies. On the other hand, that same NWC wargaming had not been intended for predictive purposes but to teach decision making. In that respect, a more important point becomes the NWC wargames’ direct influence upon the evolution of War Plan Orange, used to defeat Japan during the war. Although much of that influence was indirect and could never be proven historically, it was likely due to the fact that people like Nimitz and Adm Ernest King had played those wargames. In particular, the fleet-exercise experience of “carrier admirals,” such as William “Bull” Halsey, Frank Fletcher, and Marc Mitscher most likely had an impact on their ability to fight decisive carrier battles. Not only the admirals but also their staffs learned through human interaction to improve adaptive decision-making abilities. They gained experience, learned to ask the right questions, and learned to anticipate the enemy and fog of war.

Wargaming during the interwar period was not unique to the Navy, of course. At the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Langley Field, Virginia, and then Maxwell Field, Alabama, faculty members such as Maj Claire L. Chennault and Capt George Kenney developed and conducted games, exercises, and “illustrative problems” to explore tactical and operational uses of airpower for attack, bombardment, pursuit, and observation—often using methods other than those traditionally envisioned by the Navy and Army.⁹ No doubt, this activity had enormous subsequent impact on American aviation during the Second World War. But the actual gaming and exercise process at ACTS was less than optimally effective due to arbitrary restrictions and rules to ensure, for example, that bombers would always succeed and that pursuit would always support bombardment in a prescribed manner.¹⁰ By contrast, NWC wargaming had a better approach.

In large part, the reason for NWC wargaming’s success lay in its balanced approach to the process of learning itself. In wargames, the learning process is usually more important than the outcome of the gaming battle. Whether one conducts analytical or manual wargames, it is imperative not to “cook” the data to try to “prove” a desired outcome. In other words, one cannot allow the tools to dominate the process.¹¹ In addition, the more we develop machine-centered analytical tools, the more we must strive to maintain a balanced state of wargaming that continues to recognize the value of human interaction.¹²

Alarmingly, however, the present trend is to move away from that vital characteristic of human involvement in decisions. There is an insatiable appetite for detailed simulations, empowered by the exponential increase in computational power of the last 20 years, in pursuit of the unattainable—predicting a certain outcome. By reinvigorating the old emphasis on the human dimension of wargaming, we can tap its power to illuminate pertinent issues in the complex national-security environment of the twenty-first century. Wargaming could thus regain its utility as a thought-provoking tool that leads the way to military understanding and innovation.

We are no longer in a static national-security environment characterized by well-defined adversaries and expected conflict. Admittedly, in the context of the cold war, in which potentially decisive combat would occur between the large armored and mechanized forces of two superpowers and their allies on the central German plains, precise numbers really did matter. Against an opponent with 10,000 tanks, an attrition rate of 29 percent rather than 30 percent equates to 100 more enemy tanks in the rear area. Thus, wargaming models appropriately clashed large armored forces in areas where terrain was of little consequence and where minor differences in projected attrition rates were more important than human interaction and decision making. With attrition as the key issue, the explosive increase in computational power during the latter half of the twentieth century enabled the development of models and simulations that were highly detailed in their representation of such attrition. But such increased modeling and simulation complexity, addressing ever-increasing force levels and attrition rates, led to large, monolithic events requiring sizable investments in supporting technological infrastructures and extended periods of preparation time.

As a result, the thought processes of operational art degrade while the inflexibility of the models under development increases. This, in turn, leads to the types of doctrinal voids in the Air Force so well articulated in Carl Builder’s book The Icarus Syndrome.¹³ When much of the Air Force initially approached Operation Desert Storm with a doctrinal mind-set of AirLand Battle, our wargaming correspondingly depicted airpower’s principal function as the delivery of “fires” to support the ground scheme of maneuver. Thus, wargaming, which could have been an effective support tool for exploratory campaign planning, was not nearly as significant a contributor to planning for the Gulf War as it could have been. Not much has changed in the last decade to improve the flexibility of databases and models.

In the quest for Jominian prescriptive answers, quantitative mathematical analyses clearly have their advantages. Yet, they have disadvantages as well (fig. 2). Reproducibility can make mathematical simulations very useful from an analytical perspective, but their abstractness, by definition, produces only an approximation of reality. Consequently, they are less than perfect for future leaders trying to grapple with the chaos of war. But arguing for one type instead of the other misses the point. wargaming should not be a zero-sum “game” between mutually exclusive types; rather, these types are mutually complementary. Just as we should not discredit the value of analytical simulations, so should we not allow machine-centered analysis to eclipse computer-assisted gaming that takes advantage of human interaction in exploring the complexities of warfare that cannot be precisely modeled mathematically.

Figure 2. Spectrum of Gaming and Analysis

Figure 2. Spectrum of Gaming and Analysis

Part of the reason wargaming has ebbed and flowed with inconsistent popularity, waning support, and erratic integration into PME, as well as the nonacademic military environment, lies within the wargaming process itself. It has a flaw that can prove fatal. This flaw, as depicted in figure 2, has to do with convenience, flexibility, and—correspondingly—timeliness. As one of the world’s first wargamers, Baron von Reisswitz learned in the early nineteenth century that the king did not appreciate waiting a year for a wargame to be ready.¹⁴ A dose of reality is that to be effective, wargaming must be timely and flexible enough to accommodate the desired objectives of the game sponsor. Many wargames have gone the way of the dinosaurs. They lacked organizational commitment, took too long to spin up, did not adapt to changing needs of the sponsor, and failed to produce valuable learning. The Air Force is now expeditionary, light, lean, and lethal—and wargaming must adjust accordingly.

More specifically, successful wargaming must effectively address key questions involving the interaction of the principal actors in the wargaming process (fig. 3). The sponsor’s desires in fulfillment of the intended purpose of the game must drive the overall process to produce a valuable experience for participants and sponsor. This requires good planning; an ad hoc approach will certainly fail. With a good plan that drives an adaptable but timely process, the goal of zero disconnects between each acting agency in the design-and-execution loop is achievable.

Figure 3. Game Process

Figure 3. Game Process

As the service continues to organize, train, and equip, wargaming can spearhead thought processes. To maximize the benefits of its investment in wargames, the Air Force must integrate efforts with exercises, battle labs, experimentation, and analysis offices (fig. 4). The insights provided by wargaming help drive an “innovation battle space” and can take the form of issues requiring further exploration in different areas: command and control procedures, quantitative system or force-structure trade-offs, or basic system capabilities that appear highly attractive but need a feasibility check from a battle lab or an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD) effort.

Figure 4. OPWAR/wargaming Nexus

Figure 4. OPWAR/wargaming Nexus (Adapted from Air Force Policy Directive 10-23, “Innovation Program,” draft, 30 August 2001, 2)

Getting down to pragmatics, wargaming simply must relate more closely to the fight and become more relevant for war fighters. A mistaken impression exists that educational wargames, in particular, are just for students in PME courses. Not so. All war fighters can and should benefit greatly from experience with wargaming. Currently, however, users complain about the artificiality of wargames. Unfortunately, they are often correct. war-games are a waste of time and effort if they don’t reflect reality and if they are artificially engineered toward a “desired” outcome. wargaming students, whether from numbered air forces or PME schools, are no fools—they expect legitimacy. Tremendous potential value lies in the legitimate intellectual exploration of doctrinal issues, new concepts of operations, aspects of information warfare, ways of apportioning and allocating high-demand/low-density assets, and other leading-edge concerns that wargaming can address. However, playing the same tired scenarios, based on outdated attrition algorithms, year after year negates the very utility of wargaming. But the opportunity to address new concerns with new gaming is immense.

For example, the Air Force sees the air operations center (AOC) as a weapon system. As such, it needs capable people there to help plan and execute the air portion of the campaign. Yet, many personnel arrive at AOCs with insufficient knowledge, experience, or decision-making ability. AOC strategy and plans divisions do not have longer-range wargaming efforts. Therefore, gaming centers should work this problem with realistic scenarios and facilities that can accurately depict and exercise the process from objectives to assessment. Although wargaming is certainly not a weapon system, it can help portray one accurately. Again, the human element is key. The AOC uses machines, but it depends upon people as decision makers.

Critics will still try to argue that this confuses training with education. Certainly, aspects of learning how to operate in an AOC are purely a matter of training. But such training does not have to isolate itself from educational needs. In other words, we must ask such important questions as, What role does wargaming play in the education and training of AOC personnel? Our wargaming centers should then execute the process involved with that answer.

Today, the most notable wargames in the Department of Defense are the services’ Title X games, which, unsurprisingly, the Navy initiated in 1981.¹⁵ The Air Force entered this Title X gaming arena when Gen Ronald Fogleman, as chief of staff, recognized the value of the NWC games and the need to establish a level playing field for all the services. The resultant Air Force Title X effort was based upon a game-design concept then in use for the Aerospace Power Symposium’s wargame conducted annually at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, which involved corporate and senior civic leaders in an attempt to increase their understanding of the issues facing the military services. General Fogleman, however, changed the audience to senior members of joint war-fighter staffs and refocused their purpose to address near-term, operational-level, war-fighting issues.

The initial game took place in 1996 under the title “Strategic Force ’96” and has subsequently evolved into the Global Engagement (GE) series. More recently, the Air Force has added two more games: an Air Force Future Capabilities game, which looks at a more distant time period, and a Space wargame, dedicated to examining future issues related to the military use of space.

Developing these wargames has been a positive step for the Air Force; unfortunately, the wargaming problems identified earlier still haunt the process. Analytic tools focused on attrition require painstaking efforts to refocus them on different geographic areas or force structures.¹⁶ Their inflexibility in addressing present and near-future war-fighting issues in wargames produces large, expensive games that are equally inflexible and require excessively long lead times. In fact, preparation for the various service Title X wargames and capstone games supporting PME schools takes longer than many real-world operations.¹⁷ Even the games’ seemingly impressive analytic capability often comes up short in shedding light on important nonattrition, nonkinetic war-fighting issues of the day.

In addition, a review of recent Title X games shows a definite tendency to posit conflict with adversaries committing large force structures to the conflict, oftentimes in less than optimal geographic locations. Clearly, such force levels can be assembled within the next 10–20 years, but that is not the trend in today’s national-security environment.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently stated, “Our current national security environment is dynamic with limited forecasting visibility.”¹⁸ In the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, he notes that “it is not enough to plan for large conventional wars in distant theaters. Instead, the United States must identify the capabilities required to deter and defeat adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives.”¹⁹ Again, the message is clear. wargaming must have greater agility in addressing smaller-scale scenarios with multiple branches and sequels.

In short, we risk losing the wargaming vision and lesson from Newport. wargaming must meet the educational and training needs of war fighters and students in terms of timeliness, flexibility, realism, and focus. It is a mistake to demand definitive answers to complex issues from a tool best used to raise questions. Again, the strength of wargaming lies in exploring alternatives and enhancing insights into likely courses of action, not in providing quantitative results.

For example, one of the most enlightening and helpful wargames in some time was the South Asia game conducted concurrently with the 1999 Global game at Newport. The former provided a forum for exploring the operational aspects involved with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. It allowed for exploration of US interagency coordination as well as coalition-government cooperation with nongovernment organizations and private volunteer organizations in a military operation other than war. Aside from some ballpark casualty estimates for the detonation of the nuclear weapons, it required no direct model support. This might be the kind of game that is exceedingly relevant and timely, given current national-security concerns of terrorist attacks on the continental United States.

Turning toward suggestions for the future, the services’ Title X efforts have identified some important war-fighter issues but not to the depth required. For example, we need more work on coalition relationships—especially exploration of command, control, communications, and computer capabilities required for allies—as well as on technological and doctrinal gaps. After GE IV, although some parties expressed solid support for a game on key coalition issues, budgetary limitations precluded a game focused solely on this critical topic. Other examples of potentially key issues for the Title X series include exploring improved employment concepts for the air expeditionary force; better understanding of escalation-control measures; understanding the trade-offs between air, space, and surface intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities; and examining numerous issues regarding both policy and technology of information operations.

The human-centered, qualitative nature of wargaming can and should make great contributions to furthering our understanding of operational art, specifically in the emerging areas of information operations, homeland defense, and effects-based operations. In addition, we can improve in the area of gaming economic and political realities of military force application. To make this happen, however, assessors must be able to adjudicate applicable factors with effective support materials. Otherwise, they have to rely exclusively on personal judgment—both for attrition and nonattrition phenomena—which does not meet the mark. Some of the hypothetical campaigns developed during recent games suggest a singular inability to understand the complex interaction of these factors.

Representation of the protagonist is another area that requires examination. Have we consciously decided that having a professional red team is not a good investment? Effective wargames cannot constrain the opposition to the extent that the moves do not reflect the adversary’s operational art. Similarly, we can improve our common treatment of logistics, whose critical limiting factors are frequently overlooked to prevent them from interfering with the unfolding of the operational plan.

A deliberate effort to refine investment in Air Force wargaming could dramatically improve synergistic effects across all aspects of the innovation battlefield. Without getting too much into the weeds, this funneled effort could lead the way to a more efficient study of OPWAR (table 1) and could produce results for OPWAR similar to those produced by Red Flag for the tactical level of war.

Table 1

Potential Initiatives
for a Silver Flag OPWAR

The challenge is to reinvigorate the support that wargaming provides to developing the operational art of war by refocusing the objectives of Title X wargaming toward addressing the uncertainties of the future—a challenge laid out by the secretary of defense in the “terms of reference” for the Quadrennial Defense Review. Capitalizing on the significant investments in game-preparation materials made for Title X wargames and coupling that with a transportable gaming capability, one could provide the essential tools for the staffs of the numbered air forces and the commanders in chief to begin exploring their understanding of adversary options as well as branches and sequels.

Just as the US Army is currently wargaming its “transformation” at Carlisle Barracks, so might the Air Force capitalize on the benefit of a Silver Flag center’s exploration of new concerns. For example, in addition to the AOC issue already discussed, numerous aspects of weaponizing space relate to homeland defense and pose viable challenges.

A key ingredient to the success of NWC wargaming was the Navy’s opinion that the “opportunity to pit one intellect and will against another was seen as an essential element in the education of a naval officer.”²⁰ To promote this concept, service variety in the ranks of senior game assessors and “higher authority” players seems to make good sense. Again, the goal is to examine ideas and explore concepts descriptively rather than prescriptively. Therefore, we must build a game construct and atmosphere that intensify rather than dilute the competition of ideas. Accordingly, an Air Force–only assessment of Air Force–centered concepts may prove shortsighted. Air Force members better understand the attributes of airpower when they confront competing arguments—not when they insulate themselves from contrary concepts.

Finally, we can streamline some of the wargaming preparatory process. Under current game-design constructs, participants often spend most of their time deciding how to deploy, employ, and (hopefully) sustain forces—typically, not the major objectives of the wargame but definitely part of their tasking. Certainly, the requirement to develop a campaign plan may be the primary purpose of wargames run in the operational or PME environment, where the learning experience is paramount. On the other hand, briefings by game-control teams on some of the more fundamental matters of force employment and campaign planning, based on limited inputs from key players, could free players to focus primarily on the key issues identified by the game sponsor without undermining player buy-in to the game. Typically, however, the Title X games are run to develop a better understanding of a few key issues. Freeing Title X players from the deployment and employment issues allows them to focus on cutting-edge policy issues.

The Newport wargaming that contributed to War Plan Orange involved more than a single game; similarly, our PME institutions could benefit from increased integration of wargaming (not just capstone experiences) into curricula. The challenge, of course, is limited budgets and limited time. Thus, the coupling of Title X resources for analysis support with PME wargaming, as well as the linking of wargaming assets across the Air Force and Department of Defense, should be a winning combination. The Air Force could benefit from an overall review of its sizable investment in Title X wargaming, modeling, and simulation, keeping in mind the value in using gaming to reach as many of the right people in critical positions as possible.

The main value of wargaming lies in exploring operational art to develop insights into issues and concepts of current and future operations. It does not reside in trying to predict or prove outcomes, such as for budgetary and force-structure justification. The GE experience shows that games can reveal fruitful areas for subsequent in-depth analysis. Issues developed from wargames could serve as a road map to focus the efforts of battle labs, war-fighting centers, joint-experimentation projects, and expeditionary-force initiatives. This map would promote a coherent, efficient, and economical wargaming effort. Just as airmen have learned the most effective ways to apply aerospace power, so should we explore the most productive uses of wargaming.

1. Although wargaming is distinct from modeling and simulation, for simplicity’s sake, this article uses the terms inclusively to focus primarily on seminar-style educational wargames conducted to explore operational-/strategic-level issues, for the enlightenment of either the sponsor or the participants.

2. Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 26. In On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976), 27–35, Norman Dixon discusses the difficulty of human decision making in the two basic activities of war—delivering energy and communicating information.

3. The purpose is definitely not to argue for wargaming over modeling and simulation. They are complementary tools, each serving a unique and vitally important function for our service.

4. wargaming literature often omits incidents concerning wargaming’s deleterious effects on decision making in war. Although this article touches on just a few historical examples for purposes of illustration, for a more comprehensive look at the history of wargaming, see Matthew Caffrey Jr.’s “Toward a History-Based Doctrine for Wargaming,” Aerospace Power Journal 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 33–56; and Peter P. Perla III, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 1–160.

6. Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 99.

9. See course text titled The Air Force (Langley Field, Va.: Air Corps Tactical School, 1930), 19; and Caffrey, 42.

10. The Air Force, 59. It is interesting to ponder whether Chennault himself, or perhaps one of his disciples at ACTS, scribbled “OUT ! ! ! !” in the margin of a copy of the course text, referring to an underlined passage mandating how pursuit aircraft had to follow a prescribed rendezvous with bombardment aircraft, thereby restricting their freedom of action. See also Robert T. Finney, History of the Air Corps Tactical School, 1920–1940 (1955; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1992), 63–68.

12. Ibid., 163–67. Throughout his book, Perla implies that the principal discriminator between wargames and closed-form, simulation-based analyses is the ability to accommodate the human-decision element.

13. Carl H. Builder, The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 3–37.

15. The Global Wargame series started in 1981 as a summer activity for students arriving to attend the Naval War College. Over time the game grew to be the largest and best-known wargame within the Department of Defense. Although early participants were known to have “proven it at Newport” and at least one game culminated with the NWC president thanking the gamers for having “proven” the maritime strategy, game designers have had considerable license to experiment, both with national-strategy issues and with wargaming methodologies. As a result, the game has been a major contributor to the advancement of the wargaming art form.

16. Such tools generally involve complex, computer-driven algorithmic equations.

17. GE IV took 15 months of preparation. Allied Force took 78 days. The trend is not encouraging: GE VI will take over 24 months.

18. Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Terms of Reference for Quadrennial Defense Review,” pamphlet, 22 June 2001, 9.

19. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 30 September 2001, iv, on-line, Internet, 5 November 2001, available from "http://www.comw.org/qdr/qdr2001.pdf" .

Col Bobby J. Wilkes (USAFA; MS, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; MS, George Washington University) is commander of the College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education (CADRE), Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He has served as commander of the 355th Wing, Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, and as director of operations, Joint Task Force Southwest Asia. He is a command pilot with more than 3,800 flying hours in the T-38, A-10, and F-16. Colonel Wilkes is a graduate of Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, Armed Forces Staff College, Air War College, and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Silver Flag

A Concept for Operational Warfare

Table 1

Potential Initiatives for a Silver Flag OPWAR

Potential Initiatives
for a Silver Flag OPWAR