#1 ...Let me put this in perspective: while I was assigned to the old 379th Bomb Wing at Wurtsmith AFB, MI, when the word came down to generate the force (if it was during duty hours) it was not uncommon for the first packages (4xB28, 8xSRAM) to be hooking up to the tow vehicles in less than thirty minutes. Even in an off-hours exercise, the first convoys would have been standing by in no more than ninety minutes. Either way, at that point, the convoy would have been on the ramp in another thirty to fifty minutes, and the first birds would have been cocked less than four hours later. We had seventeen birds assigned, all would have been locked and loaded in well under twelve hours. (In a real contingency, we would have been able to get everything loaded in under eight hours, though that would have entailed throwing away the book on SOME administrative and transport procedures, none of which would have compromised safety and effectiveness.)
"All told, Barksdale personnel spent more than 30 hours generating a single nuclear-capable aircraft."
This line is a little unclear, I'm not sure they're referring to a single A/C taking 30 hours to load and cock, or they had repeated failures on multiple aircraft before they got one that would work. (Shades of Langley AFB 1980, when the USAF's first F-15 unit had a memorable and catastrophic exercise that after three days never generated a single aircraft due to repeated mechanical failures and spares problems.) But either way, the line misses the point: after four to six hours without a certified upload, for all intents and purposes THERE WERE NO NUCLEAR-CAPABLE AIRCRAFT AT BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE. And furthermore, I'm going to say that in any event, 8th Air Force and Air Combat Command didn't really believe there were any there either: as far as they were concerned, 2nd Bomb Wing was a CONVENTIONAL UNIT WITH AN EMERGENCY NUCLEAR TASKING THAT WAS UNLIKELY TO EVER HAPPEN...and they acted/behaved accordingly. All 2BW had been tasked with for the last six years had been dropping iron bombs on turbans in Gawdforsakenstan - no alert tasking, no (for all practical purposes)nuclear strike mission training (all of that had passed on to the B-1 and B-2 units years before), just one long TDY to Diego Garcia after another...and this was the result. The officers responsible shouldn't be at cushy desks at Langley, they should have been broken in rank and dismissed from service.
The United States Air Force - MY United States Air Force - should be ashamed of itself.
Mike |