This implication of actual combat experience has been strongly confirmed by large-scale tests designed to produce statistically meaningful data about air combat. In 1977, the bulk of two major air-to-air tests were flown on an instrumented air combat maneuvering range north of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada: the Air Intercept Missile Evaluation (AIMVAL) and the Air Combat Evaluation (ACEVAL). These tests pitted "Blue Force" F-15s and F-14s against "Red Force" F-5Es, chosen to simulate the Soviet-built MiG-21; Cubic Corporation’s air combat maneuvering instrumentation (ACMI) system provided a combat area some 40 nautical miles in diameter as well as "realtime" data on the engagements.60 The Blue fighters were "armed" with guns, short-range infrared (IR) missiles, and the medium-range, radar-guided AIM-7F Sparrow missiles; Red ordnance, by contrast, was limited to guns and IR missiles. AIMVAL sought to assess the operational utility of five existing and proposed IR missile concepts.61 ACEVAL explored the factors affecting engagement outcomes when multiple aircraft are involved, with force size, force ratio, and initial ground-controlled-intercept (GCI) condition (Red advantage, neutral, or Blue advantage) as the primary test variables.62 To give a feel for the scale of these tests, AIMVAL’s test matrix included Blue-versus-Red force ratios of 1-v-1 (one F-15 or F-14 versus one F-5E), 1-v-2, 2-v-2, and 2-v-4, and called for 540 valid engagements involving 1,800 sorties.63 ACEVAL’s test matrix added 2-v-1, 4-v-2, and 4-v-4 trials to the four force ratios used in AIMVAL and required a total of 360 valid engagements involving 1,488 sorties.64
The results of AIMVAL/ACEVAL were highly controversial at the time. At the core of the debate was the fact that "superior" Blue fighters, avionics, and missiles had not dominated Blue-Red exchange ratios nearly as much as had been expected (except in certain "test bins" such as isolated 1-v-1 trials). Not widely noted in 1977 and 1978 was the disconnect between these expectations and past historical experience. If superior Blue technology had proven as dominant in AIMVAL/ACEVAL as many expected, then these tests would have also revealed the irrelevance of past combat experience, especially its implication that situation awareness explained why people were shot down four times out of five. So dramatic a break with combat experience would have been a watershed. However, by 1979 more thoughtful reflection on AIMVAL/ACEVAL began to suggest that it was not quite time to reject previous air combat history. As Lieutenant Colonel "Shad" Dvorchak wrote in a special 1979 issue of the Tactical Analysis Bulletin, in AIMVAL incremental hardware advantages had tended to wash out in the long run as opponents adapted; similarly, in ACEVAL, human interactions had been five times as influential on outcomes as test variables like force ratio or the initial GCI condition.
