Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs by Steve Davies. Osprey Publishing, 2008, 352 pp.
Air Force intelligence officers—flying-unit intelligence officers, to be precise—hate rainy days. The flying schedule gets messed up, pilots who had planned to slip the surly bonds wander around the squadron while they wait for the weather to clear, and invariably the call goes out for Intel to brief them on “something—anything.” Rainy-day help has arrived in the form of Steve Davies’s book, Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs.
Red Eagles is based on the author’s interviews with roughly 40 Air Force and Navy personnel—primarily pilots—involved in the exploitation of “acquired” MiG aircraft from 1978 to 1988. It chronicles the problems and successes of a “black” program designed to acquaint America’s fighter force with the flying and fighting characteristics of the MiG-17 Fresco, MiG-21 Fishbed, and MiG-23 Flogger.
Although earlier MiG exploitation programs operated under different names, “CONSTANT PEG” became the code name for the longest running of these. Beginning in 1977 with the stand-up of the 4477th Test and Evaluation Flight (prior to “acquiring” aircraft) and continuing until the 1988 stand-down of the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron and dispersal of the remaining MiGs, CONSTANT PEG’s MiGs flew 15,264 sorties, exposing 5,930 crews to these aircraft and providing the missing element in post-Vietnam air combat training: realism. Prior to the Red Eagles’ arrival and formation of the Aggressor squadrons at Nellis AFB, Nevada, F-4s tangled with F-4s for air-to-air training, F-100s with F-100s, and so on. The change to Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT), using the MiGs and MiG-like Aggressor F-5s, made all of this vastly more realistic and emphasized the differences between US fighter aircraft and the smaller, more maneuverable MiGs. In fact, one of the first lessons in any “exposure” to MiG aircraft was the revelation of their small size and the difficulty of acquiring them visually.
The book offers a detailed chronology of the how, where, and who of CONSTANT PEG, with backstories of the pilots gleaned from the author’s interviews. Davies vividly draws the personalities of the CONSTANT PEG pilots and details both the clashes with higher headquarters and, sadly, the aircraft losses and pilot fatalities.
Beyond the personal stories, discussions about “Flying the MiG” and “Fighting the MiG”—in essence, mini-intel briefings on the MiG-17, MiG-21, and MiG-23—give the reader insight into Soviet design theory and human engineering or, in many cases, a lack thereof. For example, Soviet fighters of that era had poor six-o’clock visibility, but a periscope (like the one described in the cockpit of a MiG-17) solves the problem even though “it took a little training to get used to it” (p. 122). Early models of the MiG-21 were short on instrumentation; the notification device for “gear up” was a stick painted like a barber pole.
These three aircraft may not comprise the first-line fighters of the Russian Federation today, but thousands of MiG-21s were built and exported around the world, and many countries still fly them—as do Syria, North Korea, and a dozen other nations. So the chances of Air Force pilots encountering these aircraft remain pretty high. Moreover, the People’s Republic of China mass-produced its own version of the MiG-21 variant, the F-7, for export as well, creating numerous opportunities worldwide to see these aircraft. Up-close-and-personal static displays of the MiG-21 (and other variants from the Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau) can be found at the Smithsonian, at Wright-Patterson AFB’s National Museum of the Air Force, and even at the Cold War Air Museum in Lancaster, Texas.
If readers cannot find answers to certain questions in Red Eagles, they should keep in mind that CONSTANT PEG’s transition from the black world to the white world in 1994 was only an admission of the program’s existence and not the whole story. It is, however, the sum of what the author was told by the 40-odd interviewees who agreed to speak with him. Tellingly, he notes that most of CONSTANT PEG’s maintainers refused his requests for interviews or failed to show up, depriving him—and the reader—of fascinating tales of reverse engineering and back-shop wizardry employed to keep the secret aircraft flyable. This is not an unusual occurrence with hitherto secret programs. When the fact that the Allies had broken the German Enigma code during World War II came to light decades later, many of those who labored in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park were shocked that it was now common knowledge and refused to believe that the strict oaths they had taken were essentially null and void. No one faulted them for keeping their silence, nor should anyone think otherwise of those who won’t talk about CONSTANT PEG.
What remains, though, is a fascinating tale of Air Force and Navy pilots and maintainers who operated a vital national mission in almost total secrecy. It’s quite ride and quite a read.
Col John Conway, USAF, Retired
Maxwell AFB, Alabama