The Story Of One Of The 91st SRS COs.
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| Strategic Air Command (SAC) Headquarters, was located at Offutt Air Force Base, Bellevue, Nebraska, a few miles south of Omaha. Dottie and I bought a home in Bellevue close to the base. Our son, Gary, would be entering high school there as a sophomore and our daughter, Terry, as a 5th grader in Bellevue’s elementary school. My working area was on the third floor of the SAC underground. I had Navy Captain Robert Fuller as my JSTPS deputy. General Thomas Powers wore two hats. One as the Commander in Chief of Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC) and the other as the Director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff. General Power had a three star admiral, Vice Admiral Parker, as his JSTPS deputy. The purpose of this joint command was to develop a National Strategic Target List (NSTL), the intelligence side of the organization and with that list develop a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the operations side of the organization. The plan: to target all of the free world’s strategic nuclear weapons. SAC’s bomber fleet, the Navy’s Polaris submarine missiles and SAC’s Titan and Minuteman missiles. The European and Pacific tactical fighter-bomber nuclear weapons were targeted only in coordination with those two theater commanders. |
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| My next three years were very interesting but also stressful. One of the first challenges was to convince the Navy that the Polaris missiles alone would not be enough to win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The Navy favored a short target list to achieve their goal. The Air Force held out for a much more comprehensive list that eventually prevailed. The next challenge was the determination of how to assess the probability of each targeted weapon reaching its target and doing X amount of damage. The mathematics used in determining the probability of destruction was argued at the highest levels. Then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sent one of his “whiz kids”, Dr. Alan Enthoven to Offutt more than once to argue with our staff computations and procedures. All of these centered around, “how much is enough?” |
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| . It seemed as though I had become a briefing officer for the target side with briefings to the Air Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NATO and Pacific theater commanders and the Army, Navy and Air Force War Colleges. In addition to the many briefings within both the SAC and JSTPS staffs there was a constant need to brief many different groups with material appropriate to the security clearance of each group. Before the end of that three year tour, I wound up in the hospital with a perforated ulcer. I recovered well. Our son graduated from Bellevue High with the player of the year football honor for Omaha area high schools. Our daughter had finished 7th grade. I was fortunate to find my name on the list to attend the National War College at Fort McNair, Washington, DC. So, we sold our home in Bellevue and moved to an apartment in Falls Church, Virginia for a wonderful academic year at the National War College. Our son entered college and our daughter entered a middle school not far from our apartment. At the time I entered the class of 1963-1964 at the National War College, the class was comprised of 133 officers, total. About 1/4th Air Force, 1/4th Army, 1/4th Navy and Marine and 1/4th civilian government, mostly State Department. A fabulous year. Great lectures by the top people in government and industry; field trips to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Fort Bragg, Norfolk Navy with a day aboard a carrier; Florida with a day aboard a nuclear submarine and CIA’s headquarters across the Potomac. President Kennedy’s assassination affected us all. We will never forget watching the caisson bearing his body down Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowning field trips split the class and faculty into five groups One group each to Europe, The Middle East, Africa, South America and the Pacific. As I had never served in Europe during or after WWII, my first choice was Europe. Fortunately, I made the Europe list. The trips were about three weeks duration in the spring of 1964. Our group went from Washington to New York and on to Paris and from there to London; next a Danish Air Base in Jutland; then to Copenhagen, Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Madrid and on home. In each capitol, we were briefed by our US Embassy staff and the parent country staffs. We were the first National War College class allowed into Russia since the beginning of the Cold War. We were wined and dined like royalty in every capitol on our itinerary. Our four days in Moscow left me with lasting memories. We were housed in the 42 story Ukraina Hotel close to the top floor. We had been briefed not to discuss anything significant while riding elevators or in our rooms. They were considered to be bugged. I will always remember looking out of my hotel room window at the 8 lane highway that connects Moscow to then Leningrad at 5 PM and seeing only a handful of automobiles, mostly empty pick up trucks. My thoughts: “Never will they catch up to us in my lifetime.” While the hotel had 8 elevators, never were there more than two in service. We waited 10 to 15 minutes every time you wished to either go to your room or descend to the lobby. The briefings by their high level military and civilian leaders were straightforward and meant to make us feel that our relationship with the USSR was improving. While in Berlin, we were bussed into the East German sector through the Berlin Wall to see mounds the size of football fields where dead were buried in mass graves following the assault on Berlin by the Russians. We received a briefing from the Mayor of Berlin, Willie Brandt. The trip was the highlight of my school year and gave me a much broader understanding of what the United States had done for Europe and the political and military problems still facing our country and the countries we visited. My thesis dealt with the nuclear question of “how much is enough?”. Had I had a bachelors degree before attending NWC, I would have received a masters degree from George Washington University. . Initially, upon graduation from the NWC my orders assigned me to the Pentagon to be in charge of the Air Forces computer systems. While I was well versed in using computers, I did not feel technically qualified for that position at the rate that computer technology was advancing. As a result I was returned to SAC Hq. at Offutt. This time, we lived in Capehart housing on the base. The first and only time in my military career that I lived in government quarters for more than a few days with my family. This time, I had to wear only one hat; a SAC hat as Chief of the Target Division in the Intelligence Directorate. Again, back into the underground where I spent the next 3–years prior to retiring on December 1st , 1967. During that tour, I was involved with my staff in developing a computer system to keep track of the myriad pieces of classified target information. The Director of Intelligence, B/Gen Robert N. Smith had obtained a direct appropriation from the Department of Defense, enabling my staff to work with Ramo Woolridge to develop what we called a “Visual Analysis Sub System?”or VASS. Using mid–1960s state of the art computer equipment, Ramo Woolridge manufactured a “black box” interface between our batch processor second generation IBM computer with its target information stored on huge disc drums with the data input and output to a number of work stations (a now ancient version of today’s PCs). These input/output stations were the size of a spinet piano and housed the Cathode Ray Tube or CRT (like the monitor of today), keyboard and controls. The black box allowed the I/O station to take priority in the IBM computer over any batch work in progress. The resulted input data was then available as updated, new or deleted data when next queried. The result: online realtime information and the elimination of thousands of classified documents with their attendant problems of filing and disposal. The CRTs had a unique difference from an ordinary CRT. The electronic data was input from the side, not the back, of the tube. The back of the tube was modified to show 35mm slides of routes, targets or whatever. The I/O operators were able to overlay electronic information on the slides and store the results. The VASS was sometimes called the half VASSed system, but it worked. I believe it represented the first military use of online realtime systems then in use only by the stock markets and NASA. At the time, IBM was not interested in bidding on our system. They seemed interested only in batch processing computer applications. Si Ramo had far reaching ideas of the future use of computers. He met with me and my key staff officers at his Los Angeles area office only once during the development of the VASS but I was impressed with his outlook and savvy. The Viet Nam War was in full swing those years. As a result, my Targets Division staff was involved with targeting the Vietnam jungles that our B-52s were to strike from Guam. B/General Bill Crumm representing the operational use of the B-52s and I representing the targets side would visit Hawaii about monthly and meet with the Army staff coming up from Saigon to coordinate the areas the Army wanted struck. In my mind, this was a pure waste of strategic bombing capability. In essence, using 500 pound bombs to make match sticks out of jungles where the Viet Cong were thought to be. This was Mr. McNamara’s graduated response strategy that prevented using our forces in an effort to win the war. We were not allowed to hit the targets in North Vietnam that would have made a difference. Instead we were pursuing a war where our forces were fighting with their hands tied behind their backs. It was my discontent with this philosophy that led me to accept an offer to leave the service and join a computer service firm, National Data Corporation. I retired with 26 1/2-years of service. My last tour at SAC was 3 1/2 years. NDC was just being formed in Atlanta in the fall of 1967. I moved my family into a rental home in Bellevue, Nebraska and spent the next nine months marketing for NDC from Atlanta. In June of 1968, our son graduated from the University of Nebraska and our daughter graduated from Bellevue High School. Son, Gary, enlisted in the Army upon graduating and wound up with a tour in Vietnam about a year later. Our daughter moved with us to Reno, Nevada where I opened the west coast center for NDC and spent the next ten years as a Vice President of NDC and the manager of the Reno Center. I was involved with Junior Achievement and am still involved in Rotary. I play a lousy game of golf and I became fully retired in 1978. I continue to call Reno home. Our son is a real estate appraiser in Reno. His wife is a bank Vice President. Their daughter is also a real estate appraiser. Our daughter, Terry, is an Associate Professor at the Birklee College of Music in Boston after twenty years as a sound recording engineer in Los Angeles. Dottie and I spend our winter in a retirement community in Arizona. The survivors of our pilot flying school class 42A, Brooks AFB, Texas met on the 60th anniversary of receiving our wings and commissions in San Antonio on January 9th, 2002. We agreed it would be our last reunion. We also attend the annual reunions of my WWII 3rd Photo Recon Squadron and the reunions of the RB-36 squadron that I was privileged to command, the 72nd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron. At age 83, I am happy to still have reasonably fair health and able to get up every morning. |
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