(General Curtis LeMay, former Chief of the Strategic Air Command. Photo USAF).

We talked yesterday about the Cracker Caper and the occupation of Japan after a savage war. That conflict was the one that established the bipolar system we have known most of our Boomer lives. The landscape of that new world pitted two nuclear powers armed with inventories of weapons that could end life all over our spinning world. We didn’t call it the Fires of Heck. We thought it could be Hades made real and we sought to avoid it.

That time now appears over, and the abrupt change is disconcerting. Splash waved his tablet around to display a news story that Science and Technology were created by some intersectional group not in favor at the moment, and that maybe the old mathematics doesn’t work, or is unfair or something.

Loma and rocket jumped in to ensure that 2 + 2 still equals 4, or at least something close to it. They wanted to talk about how math is done elsewhere. For example, the mighty Russia we remember has changed dramatically. Case in point? The vaunted Red Army appears challenged to achieve the conquest of a former integral component of the Soviet Union: Ukraine. The formula appears to be 1 +1 = a larger “1.”

Europe, mostly amalgamated into the “European Union” (27 member states equal “1”) with that entity generally aligned with a NATO structure (27= 1 + 1= 2) and seems committed to the third land war in region that was considered the center of mass of global empires and Western Civilization. That Europe, with America (27 + 1= 28), is flooding the field with weapons against the holder of the largest inventory of weapons of mass destruction. Let’s be frank: it makes us uneasy. Most of our old assumptions are based on calculations of threat and risk that no longer calculate as they once did.

We are puzzling through the New Math, and do not claim to have definitive and accurate answers. That is why we are returning to the beginning of our modern world for some examination. That is why we have returned to stories from people like Tom “Big Smoke” Duvall who helped build the post-war world.

Back then, there was some serious discussion about what a military force in the new world was going to look like. The Defense Authorization Act passed by the American Congress in 1947 attempted to remedy some of the discontinuities of the gigantic force thrown together to conduct simultaneous operations on opposite sides of the spinning globe. It seemed to work right through this morning and maybe tomorrow.

One of the bold people in the middle of it was a fellow named Curtis LeMay. You can see by his picture he was a unique symbol of those new times.

We imagine they are calling him whirling Curtis these days, wherever his essence might be.

The Writer’s Section morning production meeting on this Monday was disorganized and veered through some of the remnants of the world the General helped create. One of us had been present at the ceremonies at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha twenty years ago. That event disestablished his Strategic Air Command, the proud Air Force outfit with origins in the Mighty EIGHTH that flew from England against Germany. It was headquartered at a military base that had transitioned from an outpost of the Indian-fighting Army to become the headquarters of a command that could deliver the fires of Hades anywhere on earth.

The development of ballistic missiles, a technical legacy of defeated Germany, and submarines that could carry them changed the strategic calculation of that time. Some of the missiles were buried in concrete silos in the earth, or covered by the chill blue waves of the world ocean. Twenty years ago, SAC was disestablished and replaced minutes later by the establishment of the Strategic Command- STRATCOM- with an alternating commander from air and maritime services. Either capable of delivering the goods as directed by the President.

Curtis would have preferred to be in charge of the process. But we are in another of those new worlds now. We are still talking about how we are going to live in within it. We saw that the approach General LeMay was overcome by time. But the weapons of his time are still laying all around us as we attempt to do the new strategic math.

We may have to percolate some fresh coffee to do that, you know? Happy Hour seems a long way off…and there may be people doing their own version of the New Math, you know?

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
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