A Laboratory for Coalition Air Power and Next-Generation Training
In an era where air forces worldwide grapple with the transition to fifth-generation aircraft and the integration of emerging technologies, the Italian Air Force has created something remarkable at Decimomannu Air Base in Sardinia.
The International Flight Training School (IFTS) represents far more than its name suggests. It’s not merely a school but an entire training system that serves as a living laboratory for coalition building and a template for how modern air forces can adapt to rapidly evolving operational requirements.
After my recent visit to IFTS, I had the opportunity to interview in Rome Colonel Vito Conserva, the former 61st Wing Commander and current Flight Training Branch Chief for the 3rd Division on the Italian Air Staff.
What emerged from our conversation was a picture of an organization that has fundamentally rethought the relationship between military training requirements, industry support, and international cooperation.
The Italian Air Force in Command
The first thing visitors need to understand about IFTS is what it is not. It is not an industry program that happens to train military pilots. It is not a joint venture where multiple nations share control. As Col Conserva emphasized, the school’s emblem makes this crystal clear: “IFTS is an Italian Air Force School powered by Leonardo, in collaboration with CAE.”
“We own the program,” Col Conserva stated emphatically. “We are the only ones authorized to change it or to decide how to apply it, and we also guarantee the quality of the training.” This ownership extends to every critical aspect of the training pipeline. While civilian instructors fly many missions, all end-of-block flights, flight checks, and critical evaluations are conducted by military instructors. Why? Because the Italian Air Force must guarantee to partner nations that they’re receiving the quality they’re paying for.
This distinction matters profoundly. When foreign air forces initially considered sending students to IFTS, some were skeptical. They worried that industry involvement meant the program was no longer truly an Air Force operation or that it might become subject to the scheduling delays, quality variations, and shifting priorities that sometimes characterize contractor-run programs.
But after site visits and careful examination, these concerns evaporated. Nations recognized that they were dealing with an advanced, coalition-savvy air force that maintained complete control over curriculum, standards, and outcomes.
The Industry Partnership Model
Understanding why the Italian Air Force chose to partner with industry requires appreciating the specific problem they were trying to solve. Italy has a long tradition of training international students, a tradition that extends back decades. By 2010-2011, with Qatar, Singapore, and other nations joining Italian students at Galatina Air Base, the program faced a crisis of success. Demand was overwhelming the available airspace, runway capacity, and physical facilities.
The Italian Air Force could have responded conventionally by requesting funding for gradual expansion through traditional military construction and procurement channels. Instead, they created an innovative partnership model that achieved the same result in less than two years, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war.
The key insight was recognizing what industry could provide better than a traditional military bureaucracy: rapid logistical support and maintenance. “If I need logistical support right now, I can just go, ‘Hey, I need this,’ and they will provide it to me,” Col Conserva explained. “If I do that in the Air Force, I’ve got a long and complicated process. Maybe I will get the same support, but not today, not tomorrow, maybe in a couple of months, which is when I will not need it anymore.”
This arrangement creates aligned financial interests. The Italian Air Force spreads its resources across all its needs, while industry partners can invest in infrastructure knowing they’ll recoup costs through training contracts with international students. The result is a state-of-the-art campus with advanced simulators, comfortable student accommodations, and 24/7 support services which are all designed around a single purpose: eliminating every possible excuse for student failure except actual performance.
Coalition Building Through Training
The IFTS model reflects something fundamental about the Italian Air Force’s identity and capabilities. As a medium-sized air force with extensive coalition experience, Italy has developed what might be called “coalition DNA” or an institutional understanding that effective air power in the modern era requires working seamlessly with partners.
The best definition I have ever heard was delivered at a seminar in Denmark in 2015 which I helped organize on the future of airpower. Then Colonel Anders Rex, later to be head of the Danish Air Force put it this way:
“Being a good coalition partner takes practice.
We have a core group in the Danish Air Force, which has done several coalition operations, and when we are not doing that we participate in multinational exercises.
This is a core competence that the Danish Air Force has developed, and as we do so we work to find the gold in each coalition operation.”
Of course, the USAF is a much larger force than that of Denmark’s.
But Col. Rex underscored that “it’s so big that if you look at the rate of coalition training opportunities per airman I’m sure it’s a lot lower than an air force like the Danish one.”
For the operations which we undertake “It’s really important to know and understand how to make the most out of a coalition, how to dig out the gold.”
Airpower is the essential element to any kind of rapid response coalition operation.
Look at the Libyan operation as an example.
“The Libyan mission was decided and less than 12 hours after the political decision, six Danish F16s took off from Denmark and flew down to Sigonella (in Italy); and less than 30 hours after we landed down there we flew our first combat mission in the operation.
“That is fast.”
Col. Rex highlighted that the Danes are able to do that because of their rapid decision making cycle.
“The Danes have clear responsibilities and a tightly knit force.
“One of the good things about being small is that you know everyone, especially when you get to the colonel level, for instance, there’s very few of us.
“I think there’s about a hundred, so it’s easy to know a hundred people.”
He also argued that coalitions are about diversity and being able to combine different forces that provide different capabilities into an integrated whole.
But of course, to do that you have to train, train, and train together.
A clear challenge for effective coalition operations is releasability of information in a timely manner.
“All the information and all the intelligence is not worth a thing if you don’t have a system for disseminating it.
“Yet there’s an upside to it as well because of coalition diversity where you bring into the operation different people with different experiences and expand the knowledge base.
“So the knowledge pool should be a lot bigger as a result of operating in a coalition.”1
IFTS embodies this enabling philosophy. By hosting students from multiple nations and maintaining complete transparency about curriculum and standards, the Italian Air Force builds trust and interoperability at the most fundamental level, the individual pilot’s training. Students return to their home countries not just with skills but with shared procedures, common tactical language, and personal relationships with pilots from other nations.
Harmonizing the Training Pipeline
Perhaps the most significant innovation at IFTS is invisible to casual observers: the complete harmonization of training across the entire Italian fighter pilot pipeline. Beginning in 2016, the Italian Air Force undertook a comprehensive review of all training phases, from basic flight training through operational conversion units (OCUs) to operational squadrons.
The goal was ambitious: eliminate all duplication of training events across phases and ensure that each phase builds directly on the previous one without gaps or redundancies. “We wanted to avoid having duplication of events in the following phases,” Col Conserva explained.
To achieve this, the Italian Air Force created a unique coordination mechanism. Every six months, instructors from the M-346 advanced training program (Phase 4), the various OCUs for Eurofighter, Tornado, and F-35 (Phase 5), and operational squadrons come together. They fly together, review procedures, and adjust curricula based on real-world operational experience.
This creates a continuous feedback loop. Operational squadrons, including those deployed on NATO missions in Estonia or Lithuania, identify tactical or procedural changes based on evolving threats and operational environments. These lessons flow back to the OCUs, which adjust their training accordingly. The OCUs then inform Phase 4 instructors about the specific skills and mental models students need to arrive with, allowing IFTS to refine its advanced training curriculum.
The results are measurable and dramatic. Students graduating from Phase 4 now require about 20%-30% less training time at the Eurofighter OCU. Why? Because they arrive already knowing the same tactics, radio calls, and procedures they’ll use operationally. They only need to learn the specific characteristics of their operational aircraft or the “physics” of how a Eurofighter performs compared to an M-346. The mental furniture is already in place.
Rethinking “Fifth Generation” Training
One of the most insightful parts of my conversation with Col Conserva concerned the widespread misunderstanding about training for fifth-generation aircraft. Many programs claim to prepare students for the F-35 or other advanced aircraft. Col Conserva was blunt: “Whoever says that can train you so that you will be ready to fly a fifth-generation aircraft is lying. If you want to train on the fifth generation, you should fly a fifth generation.”
This might seem like a limitation, but it’s actually the foundation of IFTS’s pragmatic and effective approach. Rather than claiming to replicate fifth-generation capabilities, the Italian Air Force asked their F-35 instructor pilots a different question: “What do you need students to already know when they arrive that will make your life easier teaching fifth-generation tactics?”
The answer shaped a fundamental revision of the advanced Phase 4 curriculum. F-35 instructors identified specific mental models and procedural disciplines that, if already internalized, would allow students to focus on the unique aspects of fifth-generation operations. For example, students need to understand intuitively that at specific distances from a target, they should have specific sensors active, synthetic aperture radar at one range, ground mapping radar at another, targeting pod for positive identification at a third. And they need to execute these procedures without verbal communication with wingmen who may be 10,000 feet below and 20 miles away.
These aren’t aircraft-specific skills for the M-346 can’t replicate true fifth-generation sensor fusion or stealth operations. But they are the foundational cognitive and procedural skills upon which fifth-generation tactics are built. And the results speak for themselves: Italian students consistently score at the top of their class at Luke Air Force Base’s F-35 OCU.
Software-Defined Training for Software-Defined Aircraft
The M-346 advanced trainer embodies another crucial insight: modern air power is fundamentally software-driven. The aircraft has no physical hardpoints under its wings for everything is simulated through software. Want to train with a new weapon system? Change the software. Need to adapt to new tactics or threats? Update the code.
This creates a training paradigm perfectly aligned with the reality of modern combat aircraft. Fifth-generation fighters, advanced missiles, unmanned systems, all are software-defined platforms whose capabilities evolve continuously through updates rather than physical modifications. Students training on the M-346 experience this reality firsthand. They learn to adapt to changing aircraft capabilities, to work within software-defined systems, and to think about tactics and procedures that can evolve as rapidly as software can be updated.
This approach also makes the IFTS model inherently future-proof. As air power continues to evolve, whether through sixth-generation aircraft, loyal wingman drones, or other emerging technologies, the training system can adapt. The Italian Air Force, as custodian of the curriculum, identifies needed changes based on operational experience and requirements. Leonardo and CAE then adjust the “digital enterprise” of simulators and software to support those requirements.
Live, Virtual, and Constructive Integration
While much attention focuses on IFTS’s physical infrastructure, the impressive campus, the advanced simulators, the M-346 aircraft, Col Conserva emphasized that the real innovation lies in how the Italian Air Force has constructed a hierarchy of Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training that integrates seamlessly with actual flying.
This integration matters because it allows students to experience operationally relevant scenarios that would be impossible or inadvisable to replicate in actual flight. Complex multi-domain operations, specific threat scenarios, coordination with space and cyber effects, these can all be introduced through the virtual and constructive layers while students are still flying training aircraft.
Student-Centered Design
Walking through the IFTS campus at Decimomannu reveals another dimension of the program’s philosophy. The entire facility is designed around student success. Comfortable accommodations, quality dining facilities, 24/7 reception services, advanced simulators, and well-maintained aircraft, all exist to eliminate any possible excuse for failure except actual inability to perform.
“There is no excuse,” Col Conserva stated flatly. “If you fail, you fail because you are not able to do it, not because of environmental causes.” This might seem harsh, but it reflects a deep respect for the difficulty and importance of the training. The Italian Air Force has created optimal conditions for success. Students who cannot succeed under these conditions simply may not have what it takes to be fighter pilots and it’s better to identify that during training than during combat operations.
This student-centered approach extends to the demanding nature of the curriculum itself. Phase 4 training is intentionally rigorous, pushing students to the limits of what can be achieved in an advanced trainer. The payoff comes later at the OCU and in operational squadrons where Italian-trained pilots arrive with the mental discipline and procedural foundations to excel.
A Template for the Future
The IFTS model offers lessons that extend far beyond Italy or even Europe. As air forces worldwide grapple with the challenges of fifth-generation integration, emerging technologies, and constrained budgets, the Italian approach demonstrates several crucial principles:
• First, ownership matters. Industry can provide valuable support, but the military must maintain control of curriculum, standards, and outcomes.
• Second, harmonization across the training pipeline eliminates waste and improves outcomes.
• Third, continuous feedback from operational experience keeps training relevant.
• Fourth, coalition building happens most effectively at the individual training level.
• Fifth, software-defined training systems match the reality of software-defined combat systems.
Perhaps most importantly, IFTS demonstrates that innovation in military training doesn’t require abandoning military leadership in favor of contractor control. The Italian Air Force has found a way to leverage industry capabilities while maintaining the standards, discipline, and operational focus that only a professional military organization can provide.
As air warfare continues to evolve toward greater integration of manned and unmanned systems, multi-domain operations, and software-defined capabilities, the training paradigm created at Decimomannu offers a proven template. It’s not about the specific aircraft or technology; rather it’s about creating a learning system that can adapt as rapidly as operational requirements change, while building the cognitive foundations and procedural disciplines that transcend any particular platform.
The International Flight Training School isn’t just training pilots for today’s aircraft. It’s creating a model for how modern air forces can prepare aviators for an uncertain future while building the coalition relationships that will define air power in the decades ahead. That’s the real revolution happening in Sardinia.
I have recently visited the Italian International Flight Training School on Sardinia.
This is the second of several articles based on my interviews and discussions while visiting the Sardinia base in October 2025.
The AI generated image highlights the international engagement at IFTS, and the integration of the LVC ecosystem with the M-346 live aircraft. The level of integration is quite remarkable.