02 October 2002

(This would have been an image of the “shape” of a weapon of mass destruction. It was a US Air Force picture, declassified in 1960, but unable to load due to local connectivity issues at The Farm).

You can see from the date above the title that this outing (Morning? Afternoon?) is molded out of a story crafted more than twenty years years ago. It is a little startling, and so struck me last night in the first time I had seen it in twenty years. The satellite connectivity was crappy as I took to my bed, tablet in hand to lull me into sleep. The usual websites would not come in, and clicking on a folder mis-named as “Files,” it came from wherever Google stores these ones-and-zeroes. The title was more dramatic, so I changed the “Hades” term to the softer one acceptable in mixed company. But we have been talking of atomic conflict more often than usual lately, and I read through the old words about an event in our Atomic History.

In October of 2002 we were still in the aftermath of 9/11. There were all kinds of things going on, and some of them involved our Strategic Triad, the three legs of our ability to end the world from land-based ICBMs, sea-based SLBMs below the waves, and the traditional aircraft delivery systems. That is not how things had evolved in our command and control systems. Since the Bombs were dropped on Japan, our Army had divested it’s Air Corps to form a new service called “The United States Air Force.”

The common argument in part of that saga was that soldiers and sailors no longer determined how wars would be fought. All offensive operations could be controlled from the skies. We know now that isn’t true, and even as a mostly sea-based crowd, acknowledge it is soldiers (and Marines) who determined fate on the field of conflict. Accordingly, in that October long ago, Curtis LeMay’s proud Strategic Air Command was going to transition to be a component of something altogether new: the United States Strategic Command, which would consolidate all strategic weapons systems, land sea and air, into one basket.

As we watch new Atomic states emerge- India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Israel- we can apply the lessons learned over the 80 years that we, the inventors of the technology, have experienced.

At the time, I was assigned to manage a budget staff responsible for funding a part of our system. In recognition of the symbolic unification, I went to Nebraska to witness the ceremony changing the authority for managing our Atomic response. Here is some of it for consideration of a world in which the Atomic shadow is shifting.

“Omaha is a great little city in the middle of vast rolling plains and plenty of corn. It was the place where the tide of westward movement took a brief rest at the banks of the broad and normally placid Platte River. There, the travelers watered their stock and got ready for the push across the tall grass to the endless horizon. This big little city of broad-shouldered cornhuskers and tall strong women also would up as the nerve center for the fury of nuclear Armageddon. Funny, the luck of it.”

Omaha has never had good luck for me and this trip was no exception. It wasn’t until I prepared to leave for a visit to the newly-minted NORTHCOM headquarters in Colorado that I realized a little part of me would always be a part of Omaha.

Then I complained about the joys of travel. One thing about Omaha, or maybe the main thing, is that if you turn around real quick you are headed into the vastness of the prairie. I remembered the first time I had seen the place from the back seat of a Rambler Ambassador station wagon forty years before. Now sixty, looking back from 2022. We were headed on a family excursion to the West Coast from Detroit, following the path of the wagon trains that came to the Platte River. From Council Bluffs the view of the vastness of the horizon was overwhelming.

My business there was at Offutt Air Force Base, home of the United States Strategic Command. From the rental car, I didn’t see a damned thing passing through Belleview. I took the exit for the base and drove on once I showed the guard my ID. I drove past the security fence around the pristine 12,000 foot runways. This post had been part of the Indian-fighting Army. The quaint brick buildings, parade ground and the Commander’s gingerbread mansion were from that era amid the sleek jets and the smooth concrete taxiways.

This is the hereditary home of the Strategic Air Command. The birthplace of Curtis LeMay’s SAC, the no-nonsense guaranteed deliverers of the fires of heck, on demand. There is a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber near the gate, a proud bird, the one that my Uncle said didn’t fly as well as the B-24 Liberator. The four engined prop plane was harder to land, he said, but it would always bring him home to try again. Next to Fortress, to demonstrate the patrimony of the Command, is the mighty condor-shape of a retired B-52 Strato-fortress. That Big Ugly Fat Fellow (BUFF, although there are other “F” words often used) flew, year after year, to their jump off points in the Arctic for the massive strike on the Soviet Union. They are flying still, Seventy years airborne now as a class of jets that hosted four generations of crews.

I imagined they are calling him whirling Curtis LeMay then. That man and this base were at the root of the last tectonic change in the American military. From this sprawling base and the bunkers beneath it the bombers were controlled at their fields across the upper tier of states. Later the missiles came. The Air Force declared itself the master of space, as well, though it didn’t work out that way. The missiles still sit in their concrete silos and the bombers still train, though their eight-minute alert has been suspended.

The Navy had developed its own missile force and deployed it on submarines. A D-5 Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile now sits on a pedestal in front of the Air Force Minuteman 2, also in front of the headquarters. An Admiral Commanded the place, rotating the Joint command between the Services. Within the Air Force a religious battle as fierce as any schism raged. The bomber clique faced the fighter Mafia, in a high stakes, winner-take-all struggle for the soul of the Service. In a hearing before Congress the ascendant bomber guys wheeled the retired Curtis LeMay himself forward to deliver the revealed wisdom, that the Strategic Forces must remain pure and inviolate.

They say you should never ask a question in court to which you do not already know the answer. This was big stakes, and Curtis said he thought a conventional mission for the bombers was just fine. The bomber guys looked at one another in horror. Their icon had sold them and their strategic mission down the river. The rout that ensued swept the fighter Mafia into the leadership, and in an act as symbolic as it was savage, the bombers were whisked away from Offutt, the swaggering manhood of the place stripped away. The Strategic Air Command was shut down, its mission and assets transferred to the joint Strategic Command, and sailors reported to the base.

But the power, albeit different, remained, as did the marvelous facilities that LeMay had built. The President came here on 9/11, a place of refuge as his people struggled to figure out what had just happened to us.

Today was sunny and mild. An airborne National Command Post airplane, a behemoth based on the Boeing 747 airframe, was in the pattern doing touch and goes. One of those airplanes, call-sign Looking Glass, was aloft 24 hours a day for nearly thirty years. The airplanes were limited in flight only by the oil in their engines, and the availability of KC-135 tankers to ferry them gas. They are still on alert, just in case. Can you imagine another nation-state with this treasure to spend on mighty aircraft that can carry the continuity of its government aloft, above the clouds?

“We talked business in the basement, not under the thick concrete slab of the Command Center, but safe enough. Later we saw the Commander, Admiral Ellis, as he strode into the cafeteria to grab a bite before the dis-establishment ceremony. And then, moments later, the re-establishment of a new command of the same name, one that will deliver the fires of hades, and anything else for that matter, to wherever the President decides it must be delivered.”

That was the dramatic ending to an old story. It is worth a mention now that the holders of weapons of mass destruction have spread from the old four: Russia, America, the UK and France. The new ones are restive, and they have not yet had decades to figure out how the fires might be employed in the post-Cold War age. The Russian problems have demonstrated the real problems in their invasion of Ukraine. Some of us down by the Fire Ring fear that our own military, now convulsed in Justice and pronoun issues appended to the War on Terror, may demonstrate some similar weakness in a conflict to come.

We hope the men and women at Offutt, in the silos under the plains and the boats beneath the waves, are safe today. And remembered to change their clocks.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com