On 1-Jan-2008, wrote:

The military usually takes holidays off unless someone is shooting
at them, and even then sometimes.

Everybodies military; if they don't the other side will get really
suspicious.


2. I'm not sure that highlighting the incompetence of our Cold War-era
Air Force is a good way to prove that handing over our home defense to
the Air Guard has been a good idea. The fact that at the height of the
Cold War our air and support crews predictably took weekends and
holidays off -- and broadcast this status over walkie-talkies -- does
NOT inspire confidence. It just doesn't get much dumber than that,
tactically.



Jim's thought about everybody's military taking normal time off to keep the
other side from getting suspicious is probably a big clue why we were so
open in our communications about ZULU and maintenance operations in general.
I really don't think our Air Force was incompetent. Where there was need to
keep things under wraps, we did a pretty good job of it. Remember how long
the F-117 had been flying before it was revealed publicly? I know of a few
other classified systems that we kept under wraps for some time until there
was no longer a need for them to be kept secret. Ever hear of Combat Tree?
It was a system we carried in our F-4s that could actively interrogate the
Soviets' IFF systems or passively listen in on Soviet IFF replies to their
own interrogations. It was a great thing for IDing and locating bogies. I
worked on that one in our jets, and I know it was kept classified for a lot
of years. We even had plastic "switch guards" we put on the control heads to
keep our WSOs from being able to select the active interrogation mode
accidentally, so the Soviets wouldn't detect the interrogation signal coming
from our side and give away the capability we had. It was declassified just
a few years ago.
To put Jim's thought another way, if we kept the normal number of jets on
alert and didn't work too hard at concealing what was going on in
day-to-day operations, the Soviets would have no reason to think we were
planning an attack and tensions between us could be kept low. I don't know
too much about how the Soviets conducted their day-to-day operations, but
everything I'd heard said that if they began preparing to attack NATO, we'd
have ample notice. It's virtually impossible these days to prepare for an
attack without undertaking preparations the other side is bound to detect.

It was very easy to notice the disconnect between what Reagan and our
government were saying about how dangerous the Soviets were and how
relatively unconcerned our command staff seemed to be in real life. We
certainly trained for combat, but I never felt as though war was imminent
aside from when we bombed Libya. Then it got a little scary.
Chernenko/Andropov/Gorbechev and the Soviet government were also
frequently telling their people how evil we were and how they had to be
prepared for a NATO attack, and I'd guess at the operational level they
were probably about as relaxed as we were, call it relaxed vigilance on
both sides. I used to be able to pick up Radio Moscow on my AM radio in my
car and at home, and listening to their propaganda made it easy to see the
exaggerations they told their people about us and start to see how a lot
of what we were being told about them by our government was probably
equally exaggerated. The threat of a Soviet invasion of NATO (and the
threat that Saddam, Kim Il Jong, and Iran pose or posed to us) was
certainly there but greatly exaggerated for our government's own purposes.
In my humble opinion, of course.

As for the incursions the Warsaw Pact did to check our responses, we did
indeed do similar things. See :
http://www.aiipowmia.com/koreacw/cw1.html
for a list of our aircraft that the Soviets shotdown while on recon
missions. There were other things we did that didn't involve overflying
their territory. A friend of mine who flew RF-4Cs out of the 26 TRW at
Zweibrucken once told me about one of his favorite missions, which he called
"a Banzai run". The 26th had several airplanes modified with an electronic
recon system called TEREC, which could detect and through triangulation
fairly precisely locate radar emitters. The Soviets were usually pretty good
about keeping most of their air defense radars turned off, so we wouldn't
know where they were. Of course in planning for a war you'd want to know
where ALL of their air defense radars are located. So on TEREC missions,
they had the TEREC RF-4C flying at low altitude near the border to escape
detection by the Soviets. In the meantime, another RF-4C flying over the
middle part of West Germany would suddenly turn toward the border and
accelerate as though they were going to blast across the border, turning
back away from the border at the last second. Of course the Soviet defenses
would immediately be put on alert, not knowing what this crazy American
fighter was going to do, and all their radars would light up. In the
meantime, the TEREC jet would pop up and cruise aong the border, recording
and locating all of the emitters.

For the question of the ANG operating the Air Defense units in the CONUS, I
found a fascinating history of that on the Air National Guard's website. I
was especially interested to see what Colin Powell as the Chairman of Joint
Chief of Staff thought about alert aircraft in CONUS. Here is the pertinent
section, from

http://www.ang.af.mil/history/Herita...erTheStorm.asp

Maintaining the air defense and air sovereignty of the CONUS were federal
missions accomplished by 1st Air Force, a numbered air force (NAF) assigned
to the ACC. In 1994, the Air Guard had begun taking over 1st Air Force which
provided the command and control mechanisms for providing the air defense
and air sovereignty of the continental United States. The original
conversations proposing that transition had taken place between Maj. Gen.
Killey, then ANG Director, and Gen. Robert D. Russ, then Tactical Air
Command Commander, during 1990-1991. General Russ, a strong supporter of the
Air Guard, had originated the dialogue. He had noted that all the fighter
interceptor squadrons defending the CONUS by that time were ANG units.
Defense of the homeland had seemed a natural fit for the Guard. The Air
Force had wanted to transfer responsibility for resourcing that mission to
the ANG primarily for two reasons. First, it had needed to reduce its own
end strength because of post Cold War downsizing. Second, it had thought
that the ANG was in a better position to politically defend that mission
which had been coming under increasing attack as expensive and unnecessary.
For their part, Air Guard senior leaders wanted to maintain as much of its
fighter interceptor force structure as possible. Moreover, they needed to
find new missions for much of its combat communications and tactical air
control units which faced dramatic drawdowns in the early 1990s. The BRAC
report of March 1993 gave the transfer proposal additional impetus. It
directed the Air Force to either move the Northeast Air Defense Sector
(NEADS) from Griffiss AFB, New York or give it to the ANG. Since ACC did not
want to move it and was unable to consolidate it with another sector,
transfer to the ANG appeared to be a logical choice. Following discussions
between General Killey and senior Air Force leadership, agreement was
reached to transfer the entire responsibility for 1st Air Force to the ANG.
In September 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin approved the transfer.
On 28 January 1994, General Killey, who had just stepped down as Air Guard
Director, assumed command of 1st Air Force as directed by General Merrill A.
McPeak Air Force Chief of Staff. With that action, the main impetus for
completing the transition to Air Guard control shifted to Tyndall AFB,
Florida from the NGB, the Air Staff, NORAD, and Headquarters, ACC. However,
the transfer was also intended to place the Chief of the NGB and the ANG
Director in partnership with the Commander, 1st Air Force to assist the
transition. Throughout the conversion process, all affected units had to
maintain combat ready status.
On 1 December 1994, Headquarters NEADS was redesignated Headquarters
Northeast Air Defense Sector (ANG). During FY 1995, Air Force leadership
directed the acceleration of the transfer process and won approval from the
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs to hire an
additional 182 AGR personnel to help accomplish that. In October 1995, the
Southeast Air Defense Squadron and the Western Air Defense Squadron were
constituted and allotted to the NGB.
Command relationships for 1st Air Force were relatively complicated by
traditional Air Guard standards. The NAF came under ACC. As the force
provider to NORAD, ACC was responsible for providing organized, trained, and
equipped units that maintained the air defense and air sovereignty for the
Continental United States NORAD Region (CONAR). The NGB was responsible for
ensuring that 1st Air Force was properly resourced, particularly its
operations and maintenance as well as its military personnel budgets. ACC
remained responsible for major systems acquisition including modernization
of the NAF's sector and regional operations centers. NORAD continued as the
war-fighting command that 1st Air Force was responsible to in the execution
of its operational missions.
All of this was further complicated by the fact that most 1st Air Force
personnel were Guardsmen who remained in state status (Title 32, U.S. Code)
while organizing, training, and equipping for their federal missions. They
automatically converted to federal status (Title 10, U.S. Code) when
actually conducting federal missions such as doing intercepts of
unidentified aircraft entering U.S. air space because air defense and air
sovereignty remained federal, not National Guard, missions. Likewise,
certain officers including the ROC/SOC commanders always remained in Title
10 status to insure an unbroken federal chain of command.
The size and composition of 1st Air Force's flying unit force structure
continued to be a major issue during the transition. Over recent decades,
the air defense interceptor force defending North America had been
dramatically reduced from a high of 2,600 dedicated aircraft (including the
Royal Canadian Air Force) in 1958. It had shrunk to 20 ANG fighters at 10
alert locations for CONAR by February 1996. However, 1st Air Force continued
to face strong budgetary pressures to either eliminate or dramatically
reduce dedicated ANG fighter interceptor units for the air defense and air
sovereignty.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense rejected efforts to include language
in the FY 1996 and FY 1997 Defense Program Guidance to include air
sovereignty and air defense as a stated mission and to program resources for
them. In 1996, the General Accounting Office (GAO) criticized the Air Guard
for continuing to maintain 150 fighters in 10 dedicated air defense units to
defend the United States against invading enemy bombers at a cost of nearly
$500 million annually nearly a half-decade after the Soviet Union's demise.
The GAO urged that the 10 ANG units be either disbanded or given other
missions. That criticism was well established in Washington, D.C. Gen. Colin
Powell, while JCS Chairman, had advocated an end to dedicated continental
air defense force in 1993 as had the GAO a year later. Both had suggested
that general-purpose fighter forces of the Air Force, Navy and Marines --
active duty and reserve components -- could accomplish the mission.
By the end of FY 1997, the ANG had assumed total responsibility for all of
1st Air Force including its three Regional Operational Control Centers and
its Sector Operations Control Center as well as its NAF headquarters. The
transition to the Air Guard was officially complete. Air Guardsmen had
accomplished that unprecedented transition while retaining high readiness
levels throughout the process. It represented a major change in the Air
Guard's historic role, executing the command and control function for a
full-time Air Force mission. But, 1st Air Force faced a difficult balancing
act and an uncertain future. Continuing pressures to balance the federal
budget and the absence of an international peer competitor suggested that
the very survival of 1st Air Force, especially its dedicated
fighter-interceptor force, would remain an issue. General Killey turned over
responsibility for dealing with such questions when he relinquished command
of 1st Air Force to Brig Gen Larry K. Arnold upon his retirement from active
duty at Tyndall AFB, Florida effective 18 December 1997.