Military Flight Training: Major Kirk Soroka, Canadian Forces

In the summer of 2010, Maj. Kirk Soroka of the Canadian Air Force spoke to us live from Exercise
Maple Flag 43, the annual joint air training programme coordinated by the Canadian Forces.

Major Kirk 'Rambo' Soroka from 409

Squadron Cold Lake, undergoing a last
minute check before take off during a
scramble of training aircraft.
Photo: MCpl Jo-Anne Verreault

Defence IQ: Major, it’s great to have you on the show. How are you?

Maj. Soroka: Good morning, it’s a real pleasure to be on the show.

Defence IQ: Thanks for taking some time out for us. Obviously you’re very busy at this point in time
as I believe we’re now one third of the way through this year’s annual Maple Flag exercise, which
you’re overseeing out in Cold Lake, Alberta. Sir, can you tell us how well this year’s training is going,
what’s on the agenda and which forces are taking part this time round?

Maj. Soroka: Sure. In fact right now we have our AMR morning launch, they’re just starting their
engines. They’re going to be taking off here, probably over the next half hour or forty five minutes.
Basically the exercise in my view is going along famously. We have German Special Forces here, we
have French pathfinders and Canadian paratroopers that are all operating in the joint environment. As
far as the jets, we’ve got about 50 fighters that are just finishing their mass brief, and they’re actually
all walking out to do their formation briefs, and then they’ll be jumping in their jets momentarily to get
flying. The exercise itself is... the weather clobbered us for a day and, believe it or not, today’s a clear
blue sky so we’re expecting a full up war.

Defence IQ: Fantastic. And, apologies if you get asked this quite a bit, but does Maple Flag see itself
as being in competition at all with the Red Flag exercise over in the US?

Maj. Soroka: Well, basically no, we’re not in competition. We actually make a conscious effort... the
Red Flag aggressors actually come up here and help us with our exercise by providing red air. Back
in 1974, at the end of the Vietnam War the US determined that young fighter pilots that were going
into combat were getting shot down within their first ten missions, so they stood up the exercise called
Red Flag. Canada saw the value of that and asked Red Flag to help them set up our equivalent
exercise which is Maple Flag. They’re de-conflicted, so right when our exercise ends the exercise in
Las Vegas commences. So Maple Flag ends and then a few days later there’s a Red Flag exercise
and throughout the year there’s more, I guess, Red Flag exercises but theirs are basically just two
weeks, or they’ve extended theirs to three weeks, where ours is one solid set of periods, so we have
four months of instruction – four weeks of training, two periods of two weeks each, and so essentially
the air crew get to fly for a ten day war.

Defence IQ: I see. Great to get some clarity on that. So Major, why do you think it’s so beneficial to
take this multi-national approach to training forces and what are some of the new lessons that you
yourself or the Canadian forces as a whole have already this year been able to learn from those
participating allies?

Maj. Soroka: Well, you know, as far as lessons go, we’re currently fighting a major counter-
insurgency, you know, the global war on terror, and so a lot of the nations are focusing their efforts on
that type of conflict whereas both Red Flag and Maple Flag... and I actually have Turkish F16s here
as well, they’re leaving this exercise to go fly in Anatolian Eagle, their national exercise, which is
similar to the two of ours. But the lessons that we’re learning is that you can’t fight your last war, so
that’s why these exercises exist so we can train to fight state on state. So these are the large package
strikes that are required to basically suppress a nation from doing what they’re doing, much like the
Kosovo War or the Gulf War. What we’re doing here that’s slightly different from Red Flag is that
concurrently we’re actually conducting isometric type missions which is where we get into the joint
aspect of our exercise. Red Flag, what they do is that they conduct the state on state large package
or large force deployment of air combat power for two weeks and then they flex into a week of specific
roles, ISR, close air support, CAS-type training, where here we do it all at the same time. Because
here we have a large training area that is... essentially goes, we have our large army training base to
the South called the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright, and our supersonic
airspace is literally 20 miles north of the base so if you comprise... We’ve blended all that airspace
together so we have a JOA of 250,300 miles wide and about 150 miles deep.

Defence IQ: Very good. And can I ask what plans you have for continuing to evolve Maple Flag in
the future or is that something you’ll only be considering after this year’s programme is wrapped up?

Maj. Soroka: No, we’ve already started the evolution of Maple Flag to include that airspace.
Historically we’d only ever operated north of our air base in... We have a large surface area, basically
a range where we can strafe and bomb our targets. It’s 35 miles wide, 120 miles deep with supersonic
airspace continues 100 miles to the north, and that supersonic airspace is surface to 60,000. Blending
our airspace down to the south to include the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre allows us to
operate in a much wider environment but, more importantly, what we’re looking to move towards is
increasing our ability to use technology, so most of the nations out there will know, or be familiar with,
the ACMI pod. In Canada we have a system called WES, which is essentially an ACMI pod on a
soldier and those two systems can actually speak to each other and our plan is to go and use our
ACMI pods to do no drop scoring and hopefully we’ll eventually speak to those WES vests so that if I
go and drop a bomb near that WES vest it’ll actually kill that vest. And what that will do is that will
allow us to train anywhere within our current training environment here but across the entire nation,
and we believe it’s explorable, we just don’t... we have to check the frequencies and see where we go
with that. But we’re moving down the road of expanding our ability to operate not only within our
ranges but actually within our local communities.

For example, I’ve got 65 paratroopers getting on French and German Transalls and a New Zealand
Herc to go and do a paradrop into one of our local communities about 60 miles to the East of here in a
province called Saskatchewan and they’ll basically jump in. In that same community there, they are
really supportive of the military and we’ve conducted non-combat evacuation operations there, we’ve
conducted downed pilot scenarios, we’ve had the Special Forces do high altitude, low opening
insertions to look for high value targets. In fact this year we had the DN Special Forces lined up to
actually go there and capture the mayor as part of a…like a charity…a kind of goodwill thing between
our two communities, and then basically bring him back to Cold Lake and hold him ransom for that
community to come back and get him but naturally... it was all going to be kind of tongue in
cheek...and the mayor, they were all pretty excited about it in Middle Lake. So we’ve got some really
awesome community support here and that’s the part that will allow us to integrate with the
communities a little bit better but, more importantly, train in a more realistic joint training environment.
Defence IQ: Just moving away from the Maple Flag exercise for now…as with most nations, defence
budgets are obviously taking a huge hit at the moment. How has the Canadian Air Force been
adapting its approach to get the most out of both its training structure and its efforts to maintain, what
I would call, “clean” close air support operations?

Maj. Soroka: Basically there’s two

components of it, one is there’s the air crew’s
close air support training requirements, but
then there’s the battle groups, they’re going to
Afghanistan’s close air support training
requirements for their FACs and TACPs. We
have tried to streamline the ability for us to
actually find FACs and TACPs and put them
together with aircraft, because that quite
honestly is the biggest thing we’re finding is
it’s too expensive to go to ranges, you know,
100 miles away when in fact in Cold Lake we
have the ability to provide all of that and more.
So for example, what we’re doing is we’re
currently looking for a national FAC TACP
training facility. I’ve presented it to both the Air
Maj. Soroka prepares to land his CF-18 Hornet during
Force and received support from the Exercise Amalgam Dart, a NORAD exercise that tests
Commander of Force Generation to pursue a Canadian fighter forces' ability to respond quickly,
project where I’m going to construct, effectively and efficiently to potential airborne threats.
essentially, a target set that would be like an
Photo: Private Owen W. Budge, CF
urban environment, much like Yodaville down
in the US. In that same facility we’ll develop
bunkers, the high features, put power in as required but basically make an urban environment which
is difficult for FACs to work and operate within, but also it’s good training for the aircrew to actually
find a target within a, you know, a non-descript structure. Rather than have a lake, a river or a bridge
or intersection, now we’ve got to go and find the target we’re trying to strike. This facility is actually
embedded right within our academic range area and our heavy weapons range area, so if you can
imagine a manned building and at the three…like in a triangle all around them…there are three
different types of target sets and that would probably be where the FAC TACP school may operate,
where they’ll spend most of their time. And the way that we’re going to actually pit jets against
[others], and create the number of opportunities for these guys to get controls is that they stay up
there when we’re doing our day to day training, so be it air to air or just doing practice strikes, the red
air forces always have more gas left over and the blue jets return to base.

So what we’re looking at doing is having the red air, if they have any fuel left, that they would actually
just call up on this common frequency, speak to the TACP, and then they’ll push them to the active
target area. And we figure with that we’ll be able to maximise the number of controls the aeroplanes
will be able to get. In addition that all the squadrons that are here, that are conducting training, will be
able to just show up on the range and start talking to the FACs and TACPs. Particularly if they’re in
that close air support phase. And another thing that we’re looking at is, beyond Maple Flag, is that
people view both Vegas and Cold Lake as, you know, “that’s where you go for Red Flag, that’s where
you go for Maple Flag,” when in fact our air space and ranges, particularly in Cold Lake, are so
unrestricted that you can actually conduct enormous amounts of training.

For example, we had the 617 Squadron RAF Dambusters here for about five weeks with the Tornado
and they just went out there and were bombing our targets for just Force Generation, to bring their
young wingmen up to speed, because some of their young wingmen had never dropped a bomb
before. Some of these weapons they went down to the States to try and drop and it was just too…too
restricted, where they couldn’t get the clearances, whereas we managed to achieve all that in the
timelines that they needed so they ended up staying here and had a hugely successful detachment.
As part of that detachment they brought three TACP FACs that were about to head over to
Afghanistan from the Royal Marine Commandos and so we would put them into our Cold Lake Air
weapons range which simulates the northern boreal forest of Europe, but we could also in the same
day send them down to Wainwright which replicates the environment of Afghanistan, like the desert-
like environment down there. So within 120 miles we have the full gambit of targets you could face.

Defence IQ: Good to know, thanks for that. So just to round us off for today, could you tell us which
aspects on our Close Air Support conference agenda will be of most interest to you and why you feel
it’s important for people with an active interest in this field to attend this forum?

Maj. Soroka: You know in my view, for me, the continued air/land integration is a problem. If I look
today where we are, integrating with our army, where did we lose all the stuff we have from the
Second World War? How could we have bombers, you know, and fighters engaging targets near our
front-line, our forward line of troops, when today we separate them, whether it’s a training for safety or
stuff like that? Why are we operating like that? My view is – and I’ve changed the orders here – that
we will insert Special Forces on to the range near targets so that they can actually conduct post air
support like they would in a state on state conflict with helicopters. We have Predators coming in next
year to train during Maple Flag. We had Global Hawk lined up this year, but you know how do we
actually employ ordinates when we have Special Forces well deep, you know, how do we get that
information to the air crew? And if we have for example you know, heavy concentrations of armour
but in a non-permit environment how would we operate? I think we’ve kind of lost that plot. That’s the
part that I’m really keenly interested in. And whether we use Type 2-type controls, you know, beyond
a certain geographical feature or whatever? There has to be... there’s something missing there and
folks turn a blind eye because it’s just too hard of a problem to resolve.

It’s my view that if we look beyond the isometric environment which, in my view, is largely permissive,
where we own the airspace, and we sit there and loiter, we can bring in airplanes that…or we’ll find or
build or create airplanes that have a lot of persistence but also heavy pay-loads of weapons. We
currently don’t have the ability to do that when there’s an air to air threat or a surface to air missile
threat. We’re having a hard time... That may drive us down in a high threat close air support but
we’re... all the air forces have gone up into the medium altitude and I think that’s a tactical misstep in
my view.

Defence IQ: Great point. Major Soroka it’s been a real pleasure having you with us today. We will of
course see you at that event and hear more from your first-hand experience but again, thank you very
much indeed for taking some time out from your very busy schedule to indulge us today. We do
appreciate it.

Maj. Soroka: My pleasure. And as you can hear right now the jets are starting, and Maple Flag is off.
I’ve got to go.

Click here to listen to the original podcast recording of this interview.

Military Flight Training will be taking place between February 08-11, 2011. You can find out more by
visiting www.militaryflighttraining.com. You can also email enquire@defenceiq.com, or call us on +44
(0) 207 368 9300.

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