Good morning. You are the Squadron Commander of Blue Strike Squadron, and your job today is to learn how to use your assets in strike missions. Remember, CMO is not a flight simulator. It is a "tactical/operational command" simulator that replicates that tactical employment of modern air and naval forces, so you don't actually fly the aircraft. You're the boss, you tell the pilot what to do and s/he goes off and does what you tell them. Unless something goes wrong, or the situation changes of course then they have this desire for self-preservation! What is this world coming to!

You have a squadron of 12 F-16s, very handy little aircraft indeed. If you're interested in facts and figures that's about $2 billion US worth of airframes at about 165 million, each. And don't forget that you will be spending $34,000 per aircraft flight hour. The munitions you're dropping range in price from about $2000 for a Mk 82 dumb bomb to about 1.5 million for a JASSM.

Open the game and review your forces. Each of your F-16s is loaded with a different loadout, we will practice with most of the available loadouts to give you a feel for which ones to choose in a real game. Munitions selection is one of the most important decisions a player will make, and it is expensive in time if you get it wrong. Hopefully this tutorial will help you with that. We will not be using the A2A loadouts as there are other tutorials covering that aspect, we're doing real work in this tutorial. We are limiting ourselves to ground targets, although "surface" also includes ships, that will be the subject of another tutorial. And finally, we will not be conducting SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) which is a specialized skill set and will also be covered later.

A message will appear in about 15 seconds with instructions for your first strike.

Note: Modern aircraft generally don't fly alone, they like the company of a wingman. This goes to that very inefficient principle of self-preservation again! Anyway, in this tutorial we will be flying single aircraft "One Ship", where most missions you conduct in the game will be in "two ship" or even "four ship" formations. Don't ask me why they call them ships, something to do with that knight on a white charger thing I'm sure.