ACEVAL/AIMVAL

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The United States Department of Defense chartered two back to back Joint Test & Evaluations that ran from 1974-78 at Nellis AFB. both the US Air Force and Navy participated contributing a team of F-15 Eagle and F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft using the local F-5E Aggressor aircraft as the Red Force.

[edit] Air Combat Evaluation JT&E

ACEVAL looked at whether tactics of high performance US aircraft against simpler threat type aircraft equipped with all aspect IR missiles.

[edit] Air Intercept Missile Evaluation JT&E

AIMVAL examined 5 missile concepts under consideration as replacements for the AIM-9L Sidewinder. AIMVAL findings were that the new missile seekers were no better than the AIM-9L resulting in termination of the The Navy Agile off-boresighte/thrust vector control Short Range Missile missile program was under development and actual seeker hardware was utilized in AIMVAL.

[edit] Implications

ACEVAL/AIMVAL resulted in development of AMRAAM, but did not recommend development of a high off boresight SRM instead opting for a European led effort to develop ASRAAM. However, the Soviet Union did develop such a missile and fielded the AA-11 Archer (R-73) by 1985 taking the lead in SRM technology and performance for the first time since Sidewinder enterted service and causing a variety of countries to develop SRM programs such as Python-4, ASRAAM, MICA IR, AIM-9X and IRIS-T to counter it and giving rise to supposition that they benefited more from ACEVAL/AIMVAL than did their western counterparts.