Captain Ramiro Flores, a U.S. Navy program manager, described the problem of air combat training in one sentence: This program will provide modernized aircraft with exceptional avionics and tactical capabilities which are needed to allow pilots to practice the tactics and techniques employed against a near-peer threat. The aircraft at the center of this quote is not a stealth aircraft, but the F-5 Tiger II, an aircraft whose design philosophy was never to be exceptional, but to be functional.
This is where the message of the F-5 is now, caught between “usable” and “exquisite.” The F-5E was intended to be a small, twin-engine fighter that could be supported by allies who could actually keep their planes flying: small, easy to handle, and easy to support without a large parts, personnel, and software infrastructure. The bottom line was that its utility was in its availability to have planes that could produce sorties, train pilots, and show up in numbers even when budgets and infrastructure did not cooperate.
In its U.S. role, the Tiger II’s most important influence was after its front-line service: enemy training. Its small size and agility made it a credible “bad guy,” to the point that it was remembered more for its role in Top Gun as the fictional MiG-28 than as a real U.S. and global effort workhorse. This Hollywood cliché accidentally nailed one truth: a small, pointed jet can be hard to see, hard to track, and easy to underestimate, especially in the hands of a skilled pilot.
The Navy and Marine Corps are now extending this training capacity further by employing these older F-5s of Swiss design to develop more realistic aggressors. As part of the ARTEMIS program, the military is upgrading aircraft and engines and replacing old avionics with an open architecture system that will likely improve tactical realism while addressing problems of safety and obsolescence. These upgrades include modern warning systems such as ground proximity warning, as well as a cockpit layout that is better adapted to present tactics, along with threat replication tools that will allow red air to function more like the adversary’s pilots that the pilots have to plan against.
One reason why this is important is that “near-peer” training is quickly becoming a place where systems thinking, rather than aircraft silhouettes, is required. Contractor-operated F-5s have already demonstrated the capabilities of the aircraft using off-the-shelf avionics, mission computers, and threat simulation software, achieving what one operator has described as a “fourth-generation adversary platform with third-generation economy.” The Navy is essentially taking the best practices from the private red-air community and codifying them, since the problem of having enough good adversaries is as much a capacity issue as it is a technology issue.
This angle of capability resonates in the modern force structure. The F-35 is a sensor-saturated strike platform to be procured in quantity, with the Department of Defense estimating 2,470 aircraft and engines at a total cost of at least $485.2 billion, with over 990 already in production as of March 2024. Nevertheless, the program’s capability growth is dependent on software and computing modernizations, such as TR-3 and Block 4 modernizations, which have been under schedule pressure due to integration and supply chain challenges. When capability is delivered in terms of code and hardware baselines, readiness may depend on things well beyond aerodynamics processors, lab capacity, and test rates.
The Tiger II’s foil is not nostalgia; it is technical priority. A simple fighter aircraft designed for ease of maintenance and sortie generation can still be strategically useful when its mission is training, air policing, or light combat where “enough jets, flying often” is its own strength. The F-5’s service life in U.S. aggressor squadrons illustrates the same low-key point it made in the export market years ago: air power is not simply about peak capability, but about how many planes can be kept effective, secure, and available on an average day.
