Vic Socotra

06 June 2008

Decision Day

Big Ugly Fat Fellow* (BUFF) with Air-launched Cruise Missiles

I don’t think the term “D-Day” meant anything specific. “D” probably just meant the notional day you were going to do something, a point of reference for planning. In the case of June 6, 1944, the decision was about hopping the Channel and invading Europe with the greatest armada ever assembled, all the Allied Armies, Navies and Air Corps committed together. One team, one fight.

I always think about Uncle Dick on the Day. I see him as a young guy, on a swarming little patch of concrete in Sussex, England, hands gripping the control yoke of his B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, realizing he had lost an engine on take-off. He had a full load of fuel and a full load of bombs and a serious split-second decision to make.

He did so without fanfare. If he could get the airplane off the ground- big if- he was going to take it and his crew and his load of bombs and go to hit the bridge behind the beaches that might keep the panzers at bay.

Here in 2008 there was no requirement for courage. The power came on again about four-thirty, just as I was walking up from the darkened underground garage at Big Pink. The news about the abrupt dismissal of the Secretary of the Air Force his uniformed four-star Chief of Staff was stunning.

I mean, we all knew something was coming. The mistakes were so horrifying that somebody had to pay. Nuclear fuses had been sent with helicopter parts to Taiwan, and not missed for more than a year. That might have been overlooked, or the process at least corrected.

No fissile materials were involved, after all, though the tech-transfer issue is enough to give pause. But the incident last August is what tore it. A 5th Bomb Wing BUFF was loaded up with real nuclear cruise missiles for what was supposed to be a routine flight to Barksdale AFB. The missiles were left unattended on the aircraft on the ramp for several hours.

That made all the hairs on my neck stand up. I once had a Marine draw down on me with live ammunition over a dummy weapon one time, and he was authorized deadly force to protect the fake bomb. He was real serious. Given the level of gravity with which we treated the pretend munitions, actually seeing a real nuke in its white eerie elegance is a life-changing experience.

That event at Minot freaked out a lot of people. The Wing Commander was sacked immediately, and given the significance of the security breach, you would think that the Air Force would have been really anal about the follow-on inspections. This is the former Strategic Air Command, after all, the one that Curtis LeMay created.

One of the many legends that linger about him is the one where the chesty cigar-puffing general had a sentry written up for not shooting him, when he approached him in a secure area. In full uniform, no less. Talk about the no-win situation for the poor kid.

So, given that, it is more than a little surprising that the 5th Wing flunked a practice Operational Readiness Examination (ORE) last December, and really surprising that Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) awarded it an “Unsat” in the real thing last week.

In addition to weakness against simulated terror attacks against the weapons bunkers, they saw an Air Policeman playing video games on his cell phone while guarding a restricted area.

Secretary of Defense Gates had been an Air Force Officer, so maybe he took the dereliction personally. He must have come to the decision on Monday, when the reports hit his desk.

He certainly had acted decisively before, when he canned the Secretary of the Army and the Commanding General of Walter Reed when the maltreatment of the wounded veterans became public knowledge.

Mr. Gates has an interesting style. His predecessor’s imperious reign was certainly littered with the corpses of careers, but this is the first time a Secretary and his military chief were ousted in the same day.

Mr. Gates left the military matter to Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He is a nice enough guy, for a Black Shoe ship-driver, though that tends to be a humorless tribe. It must have been humiliating for the F-15 pilot to sit down with two Admirals- Mullen, the Chairman, and Chief of Naval Reactors, Kirkland Donald.

Donald is a submariner, and Bubbleheads are the most intense nuclear warriors on the planet. There is nothing amusing about what they do for a living, and no room for error. It the atom that drives the boats, and the boats that carry the missiles with the atoms on top.

Humiliating is the only way to characterize it, and all things being equal, that afternoon I was just as happy to be out of the national security business and as far away from the nukes as the rest of the civilians living in this target complex.

The humidity was coming up and the sun was flooding into the stale air in the apartment. The temperature is expected to be jump up into our first real summer feeling for the weekend. The Weather Service is predicting heat index over 100 for the first time, so the delightful windows-open days of Spring are gone, and the sultry airless Summer has arrived.

I cleaned up a few of the messes that had been created in the darkness, and got ready to button the place up after things cooled down in the evening when the sun set, and preserve some coolness against the humidity of tomorrow.

There used to be a way to preserve the natural coolness of the night in the houses here. The exquisite little museum that was President Wilson’s house in the Kalorama neighborhood preserves how it was done before the invention of central air.

At night the windows would be thrown wide open, and as the sun came up the house was sealed to keep the coolness within, shades drawn to keep the sun’s rays at bay, working their way with the slow passage across the sky until the last breath of coolness was gone, and the cycle begins again.

I wish I could do something like that, but there is not a great deal one can do with a concrete box when the power is out. Airless and out of good ideas.

That must be how the Air Force Chief of Staff felt at his meeting with the Chairman. There really wasn’t any decision to make.

* That is not what it means. You know the real word.

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