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At The Start Of 1981

The United States Air Force, at the beginning of a decade of potential peril, faces a difficult and demanding future. The bulk of its aircraft and missiles are between ten and 20 years old. Their quality, once the pride of the USAF, has been matched and frequently exceeded by their Soviet counterparts. Their numbers, once the greatest air force in the world, have long since been surpassed by a USSR build-up of weapons, munitions and personnel on a scale never before seen, and seldom even contemplated, by Americans.

The basic problem confronting the USAF is to maintain its ability to deter nuclear war and to win a tactical war, when badly outnumbered and when matched in the qualitative aspects of weaponry. And that task, as anyone will appreciate, is not an easy one.

For that reason, the USAF is arguing for a number of new programs to increase its effectiveness as a fighting force. There is no likely way that its numbers ever can match the Russian forces. But the current concept is that technology and the improvements in weapons that result from its application will serve as "force multipliers" that will enable the USAF to outfight, outlast, and beat its Soviet opposition.

When World War II ended, the USAAF had more than 2.2 million personnel in its ranks, and operated more than 50,000 aircraft. At the peak of its activities in the war in Southeast Asia, its aircraft numbered 15,327, and they were operated, maintained and supported by a total of 904,759 officers and airmen.

At the start of 1981, the USAF will field a total of about 9,263 aircraft, both in the active units and the combined forces of the Air Force Reserve and the Air National Guard. Total active-duty personnel will be about 564,000, with an additional 242,000 available in the Guard and the Reserves. These people and assets will occupy 100 active operational bases, 70 Air National Guard bases, and 48 AF Stations in the United States, plus 40 major bases overseas. Additionally, the Air Force has 34 major research and development facilities under its aegis.

The decade of the 1980s will be another time of transition for the Air Force, just as the 1970s were. The USAF came out of the war in Southeast Asia with the certain knowledge that it was not well-equipped to handle the kind of war that conflict had become. In former times, the classical task of the Air Force was to seize and hold air superiority over the battlefield, wrestling it from enemy aircraft. With that air umbrella opened, other aircraft then were relatively free to hammer ground targets in support of advancing troops, to fly interdiction missions, and generally raise havoc among enemy ranks, supply lines and distribution centers.

But the face of modern warfare has modified that basic concept. It still holds true, but from now on the adversary is not the enemy's air fleets. It is his groundbased anti-aircraft defense, a formidable assemblage of a variety of guided missiles and deadly automatic artillery that have, in effect, denied a wide altitude range to any air opposition.

Viet-Nam provided the first look at that collection of anti-aircraft weapons. The North Vietnamese fielded a number of Russian-developed anti-aircraft missiles and artillery weapons, and they did so in numbers that began to cause grave concern to U. S. military planners. The pictures they painted were bleak enough. But then the Yom Kippur War erupted in the Middle East and an over-confident Israeli Air Force was almost beaten in the first three days of that fight, hammered into the ground by batteries of well-sited and well-fought anti-aircraft weapons. It was a rude awakening for the Heyl Ha’Avir, and its lessons were not lost on the United States.

Some military thought tended to regard the new emphasis on anti-aircraft as comparable in its long-range effects to the introduction of the machine gun during World War I. That relatively unsophisticated weapon changed the face of war, and condemned the armies on both sides to long years of slow movements along a line of trenches that hardly varied in its position from one month to the next. It was a profound influence on the concepts of fighting in those days, and it totally obsoleted the cavalry charge, the infantry assault across open ground, and a number of the other traditional aspects of pre-nuclear wars.

The Russian deployment of multiple kinds of antiaircraft weapons has had a similar chilling effect on air warfare. Assigned to Russian armies as integral anti-aircraft defense, these new missiles and cannon have taken the airspace from about 1,000 feet to 15,000 feet away from any attacker, and made that region a death trap.

Consequently, the USAF began to develop new tactics and new countermeasures to take back the advantage in battle. At first, it attempted to counter that problem in Viet-Nam by flying higher, and above available cloud cover. As was expected, it was more difficult to acquire targets and to deliver the ordnance accurately on them. The alternate was to attack from a very low altitude, under the effective threat. This meant. coming down to below 1,000 feet, and often to considerably lower altitudes, on the order of a few hundred feet. This seemingly ideal element for the attacker offered the possibility of terrain masking as one way of concealing the approach to the target, coupled with the possibility that the attacker might be lost in the ground clutter of enemy radars until almost too late to do anything about him. Further, by staying low and fast, an attacker was exposed for an absolute minimum of time to enemy defenses. But flying low is very difficult and very wearing on a pilot who has multiple things to do when he is about to attack a target. His work load is compounded by efforts to find the target while avoiding terrain, smokestacks and radio towers, to say nothing of anti-aircraft artillery and even large numbers of troops with rifles.

Defense suppression, which has long been a tactic associated with air power, became even more important. A whole new concept of electronic warfare grew out of the need to degrade or destroy defenses so that attacking aircraft could have an easier run into the target.

These considerations produced superb tactical air force units during the 1970s, equipped with a number of new and specialized weapons fitted to the specific problems of the potential threats that were envisioned during those years. During the 1970s, the USAF set in motion the wheels that developed and delivered such advanced air weapons as the McDonnell-Douglas F-15 Eagle, the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, and the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II. Great advances in the technology of command and control, coupled with detection and early warning capabilities, were built into a single airborne package, the Boeing E-3 Sentry. Highly modified Republic F-105G Wild Weasel aircraft, a single-ship hunter-killer team to seek and destroy enemy missile sites, were replaced by an advanced, more-capable McDonnell-Douglas F-4G. New missiles for ground attack and air-to-air missiles for dogfighting moved from experimental prototypes to production deliveries. Electronic countermeasures were built into the aircraft, or added in pods that could be preprogrammed with a variety of threat profiles. And a tactical jammer, the Grumman-General Dynamics EF-111A, became available to mask an attacker in a bright blob on an enemy radar screen.

And then, with the USAF finally well-equipped to fight the war in Southeast Asia again, the Russians forced another switch in design and development. This time, it grew from the synergistic combination of satellite reconnaissance and multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) warheads aboard intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Both the United States and Russia had been operating spy satellites, each monitoring what the other was doing. And during the 1970s, what the Russians were doing sent cold chills down the backs of the U. S. military. They were improving the accuracy of their missiles, and they had increased the number of those missiles that carried MIRV warheads. Knowing the exact location of every USAF missile silo from satellite information, the Russians could target those silos - and therefore a maior portion of the American retaliatory force – for an ICBM attack.

Suddenly, the pressure was off the devepment of tactical air power, and was on the development of new weapons for strategic forces. Thus, the decade of the 1980s will be the decade for the growth and improvement of strategic forces. Tactical air will get what it has been programmed to receive, but it will not be the lucky recipient of lots of new airplanes and missiles to do its job. The funds for those purposes will be spent for a new strategic missile system and for upgrading the abilities of the aging fleet of long-range strategic bombers.

SAC

For the near-term future, Strategic Air Command (SAC) will be the dominant force within the USAF. Its mission is to be a part of the deterrent forces, those missile and aircraft strengths that would presumably cause any potential aggressor to think more than twice before attacking the United States. The deterrent force is expected to deter nuclear war; obviously its presence did nothing to deter the limited tactical war in Southeast Asia. SAC operates two types of forces: long-range strategic bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those paired elements make up two-thirds of the so-called "triad" of deterrent forces, the other third being the submarine-based, sea-launched ballistic missiles of the U. S. Navy.

SAC flies about 350 Boeing B-52D/G/H Stratofortress bombers plus 65 General Dynamics F-111A supersonic low-level bombers. Supporting these is a fleet of more than 600 Boeing KC-135A tankers, the strategic reconnaissance aircraft like the Lockheed SR-71 and U-2, and some highly specialized reconnaissance aircraft that are modified KC-135s.

The ICBM force includes 1,000 Boeing Minuteman missiles and 54 Martin Marietta Titan II giants whose useful life is being questioned as these words are written because of an explosion in one of the silos. These are the long-range deliverers of nuclear warheads or bombs, and their mission is deterrence or, failing that, the devastation of an enemy's military - and probably civilian - might. But SAC also has contingency missions. Viet-Nam was one, as was the Korean War or SAC's part in the Cuban confrontation over Khrushchev's missile sites on that island. SAC today is an available force to support NATO or the Western Pacific region with conventional bombing, and to assist the Navy with minelaying.

Most recently, the USAF Aerospace Defense Command was disestablished, and the space surveillance and missile warning operations of that organization were assigned to SAC. The Command's current organization includes the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division, and the 3rd and 7th Air Divisions.

Tactical Air Command is, curiously enough, not primarily a fighting command. Its major mission is to organize, equip and train its assigned forces, and to maintain combat-ready units that can be moved anywhere in the world on short notice. It's important to realize that a deployed TAC unit, sent to some remote base as part of a war plan, leaves operational control of TAC and becomes part of, say, USAFE. TAC operates 2,285 aircraft under the Ninth and Twelfth Air Forces, and also serves as the air component of Atlantic Command and Readiness Command. Further, under ADTAC, it operates the interceptors and radars that go with air defense missions it took over from the Aerospace Defense Command.

TAC was the beneficiary of much of the procurement money spent during the 1970s, and its look as a fighting force has changed remarkably. It entered the decade with the bulk of its aircraft fleet composed of the aging, but still potent, McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II, plus a variety of special-purpose aircraft. Now it fields the two hottest fighters in the skies, the F-15 and the F-16, and sends its tank-busting A-10s out at low level to "root around".

Three commands take operational control of TAC units during specific deployments overseas. First of these is the Alaskan Air Command (armyac), tasked to provide an early warning of an air attack against the United States and Canada. armyac also is responsible for supporting U. S. ground troops in the area, and for defending the airspace. It has two squadrons of McDonnell-Douglas F-4E fighters for its mission. They often intercept Russian long-range reconnaissance or electronic intelligence aircraft, and have been photographed flying a close formation with their red-starred bogies.

The second major operational command is Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), the air component of the unified Pacific Command. Its Fifth Air Force, based in Japan and Korea, and Thirteenth Air Force, headquarterecl in the Philippines, are the leading edge of U. S. air power in the Pacific basin. That vast area, the responsibility of Pacific Command, covers more than half the earth, and extends from the West coast of the United States to the East coast of Africa, and from the Artic to the Antarctic. That surface is more than 100 million square miles; the air space that PACAF patrols is more than one billion cubic miles.

The United States Air Forces in Europe – USAFE - make up the third command that would take operational control of TAC units. The units within USAFE are the American commitment to NATO, and include aircraft in three numbered air forces: The Third, headquartered at RAF Mildenhall; the Sixteenth, at Torrejon Air Base, Spain; and the Seventeenth, at Sembach Air Base, Germany. USAFE strength in place is about 650 aircraft. Badly outnumbered, in war its forces would have to be rapidly augmented by reinforcements.

Military Airlift Command is, as the name states, the prime mover behind the USAF. It operates more than 1,000 cargo and passenger transports, hauling everything from military personnel on a change of station to heavy artillery and armored vehicles for the Army. In wartime, its fleet would be increased by the nearly 500 transports of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF), made available by the commercial airlines of the United States. In peacetime, almost half of MAC's aircrews come from the Air Force Reserve. Additionally, the Command operates the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service and the Air Weather Service. It is well known for its special mission capability, and the ubiquitous Air Force One, with the President aboard, is MAC-operated.

The Air Force Reserve (AFRES) not only supplies aircrews to MAC; its highly skilled airmen train with the regular Air Force as if the two organizations were one. AFRES units fly a major share of SAC's tanker missions, operating the gray KC-135s from bases around the country. They augment TAC with two tactical fighter wings, and take great delight in often besting their active-duty counterparts in the tactical skills employed by fighter pilots. Three numbered air forces comprise AFRES: the Fourth, at McClellan AFB, California; the Tenth, at Bergstrom AFB, Texas; and the Fourteenth, at Dobbins AFB, Georgia. They field more than 450 aircraft.

Another great source of Air Force strength is the Air National Guard. It's a unique organization, under the command of the governors of the individual states, but also subject to call-up by the President, Congress, or the provisions of certain Public Laws. The Guard operates more than 7,500 aircraft of many types, and represents almost one-fifth of the total force of the USAF.

David A. Anderton. The USAF enters the Eighties. The History of the U.S. Air Force. Crescent Books. 1981.

A Cold War Legacy Lloyd. This is a thorough tribute to Strategic Air Command spans the years of 1946-1992 when the command was disestablished. SAC had accomplished its mission of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War and supported a multitude of higher headquarters taskings. This is a massive work that is surely the ultimate SAC reference.

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