Air Force Archives

As I reported today, both the Army and TRANSCOM are eying development of a new class of airships that can carry up to 40,000 pounds of cargo 1,000 miles.

But that's not all, folks. Lockheed won a $400 million contract from DARPA in 2009 to develop an airship to carry a radar so powerful it could detect a car hidden under trees 185 miles away.

Though Lockheed lost an Army $517 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop an airship packed with sensors this June, the company says it "absolutely" sees other opportunities for new business.

The Navy, which operated large fleets of blimps during World War II, decommissioning the last in 1962, once again got back into the blimp game this spring when it took delivery of a new blimp, the MZ-3A airship manufactured by the American Blimp Corp. based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The Thai Army has contracted for an airship from Aria International to perform border surveillance while the U.S. Air Force operates a fleet of tethered aerostats for border surveillance in this country.

All of the above goes to show that a concept first hatched by Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier in France in 1783 still has currency today.

As I reported last month folks in my corner of northeast New Mexico have worked themselves up into a lather over the fact that the special operations squadron at Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, N.M .plans -- surprise -- to fly airplanes from that base, kept open in the 2005 BRAC round due to fierce lobbying by the state's congressional delegation.

Though the city council in my town, the original Las Vegas and the Taos city council passed resolutions against plans by the Air Force to conduct low level flights with V22s and MC-130s over northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, it looks like the Santa Fe city council will not join the mob, even though it too initially planned to oppose the flights.

The Albuquerque Journal reported on Friday that the Santa Fe city council will consider soon a new resolution which states:

""The governing body of the city of Santa Fe supports the best possible training opportunities for the armed forces of the United States," the new resolution said. "The governing body of the city of Santa Fe supports an environmental assessment that determines the potential environmental and socioeconomic consequences of the proposed LATN [Low Altitude Tactical Navigation ] training area in Northern New Mexico."

The Wall Street Journal had a good piece on this controversy today that included one truly loopy comment by a resident of a town just north of me.

This woman (and you can find her name in the Journal story) says she already is plagued by overflights by Air Force planes, including a recent one flying so low that she and her husband "we were looking into the eyeballs of a pilot bearing down on us."

Since I cannot see the eyeballs of an approaching driver on I-25 while traveling 75 miles an hour (82, if I'm truthful), the fact that this couple could see the eyes of a pilot in a much faster aircraft means they have such extraordinary visual acuity as to merit some serious scientific study.

When you lobby for an Air Force base, you end up with airplanes, a fact that the New Mexico congressional delegation has forgotten since 2005 when it pushed the Pentagon to keep Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis open when facing an early BRAC decision to close it.

New Mexico's Congress folks -- some of whom are no longer in office -- joined with Gov. Bill Richardson in 2005 to pledge a "unified assault" against any plans to close Cannon, which employed 2,800 people in Clovis, population 32,000, near the Texas border.

Then congressman and now Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said the decision to close Clovis as wrongheaded and vowed "to leave no stone unturned to ensure that Cannon remains a vital component of our defense infrastructure." He followed this up with remarks on the House floor in May 2005 extolling the blessings of unrestricted air space in New Mexico for training.

The Pentagon decided to keep Cannon open, but without an air wing until the Air Force decided to move the 27th Special Operations Wing -- which flies a special ops version of the C-130 cargo aircraft, such as the AC-130 "Spectre" gunship and the CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft -- there in October 2007.

In September, Cannon announced (surprise) that it planned to fly those aircraft around northeast New Mexico and southern Colorado.

Cannon officials said they planned a total of 688 training flights annually in airspace that covers 600,000 square miles, and vowed the flights would "avoid airfields, towns, noise-sensitive areas, and wilderness areas."

Despite the limited flights, reaction from the local portions of the citizenry, especially in the way cool New Mexico cities Santa Fe and Taos, was swift and angry. The city council in my home town, Las Vegas, N.M., passed a resolution against the flights.

Udall, while saying he still supported the Cannon mission, pushed the Air Force in September to extend the public comment period. He didn't mention the marvelous unrestricted airspace he touted in 2005. Richardson, not a shy guy, hasn't said a word in defense of Cannon.

Some of the criticisms of the Cannon flights border on the ludicrous, considering everything else that goes on in New Mexico. Activists in Taos expressed concern the flights would aggravate the PTSD of combat veterans - although as a Marine combat Vietnam veteran, I find myself aggravated annually by the fusillades of fireworks that start in mid June and end in mid July, ostensibly to celebrate the 4th.

Also, I'm still awaiting my invitation to personally discuss PTSD with Taos activists over a cup of chai and a plate of gluten free cookies.

Other folks worried about the effect of the flights on wildlife. I guess that's the wildlife that's not been driven out of the forests and mountains by fleets of all terrain vehicles, which probably generate more noise than a C-130 flying between 2,000 and 3,000 feet.

The Albuquerque Journal and my local paper, the Las Vegas Optic, also seem to have their own case of amnesia because neither has presented the 2005 background on why (surprise) the Air Force has airplanes at Cannon and now wants to fly them.

My prediction: The activists will win, and in the next BRAC round all military bases in New Mexico will be closed.

The Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has developed a database on Afghanistan to help in managing aid and development projects.

The provincial reconstruction teams that are staffed by Defense Department personnel, diplomats and even farm experts from the Agriculture Department use the database, which includes detailed information on the country's provinces such as lists of key leaders.

But the database is hard to access from remote and unwired areas of Afghanistan. But two students at the postgraduate school solved the problem. They created a smart phone application called Mobile Afghanistan, which includes detailed province-by-province information, including:

--maps
--leaders and presidential candidate profiles
--tribal and clan genealogies, divisions and histories
--economic, cultural and political development analyses
--security incidents and more

Robert Davis and Christopher Joers, both Air Force captains, developed the app as part of a class assignment from their professor, Thomas Johnson, director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies. Johnson dubbed the Davis' and Joers' app, Afghanistan in Your Hand, but Davis calls it, Cliff Notes for Afghanistan.

Mobile Afghanistan is available free on the Culture and Conflict Studies website and includes installation instructions easily understood by someone who does not have an advanced degree.

A Navy buddy of mine working on the Pakistan relief operation mused in an e-mail on Monday that for some odd reason Paris Hilton and her arrest for alleged cocaine possession received more media play over the past weekend than the fact that "we rescued thousands of people."

So, for those of you tired of Hilton coverage, here's an update on the Defense Department operations in Pakistan as that country struggles with one of the worst disasters in history.

On Monday, Marine and Navy helicopters rescued 625 people and flew in 114,000 pounds of supplies. Afghanistan-based Air Force C-130s delivered about 55,000 pounds of goods.

Since late July, Army, Navy and Marine helicopter crews have rescued 9,433 people and flown in 1.7 million pounds of goods, and Air Force C-130s have delivered 985,000 pounds of supplies since operations began.

The Pentagon has dispatched an additional 18 Army helicopters from the 1st Battalion, 52nd Aviation Regiment, 16th Combat Aviation Brigade, based at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, for the flood relief mission. They're expected to arrive in mid-September.

The Navy is operating the USS Peleliu amphibious ready group, home to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, off the Pakistan coast and dispatched the USS Kearsarge and the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Norfolk, Va., to the same waters on Aug. 27.

All this is in addition to the Defense Department's primary day jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It's good to get some perspective on what counts and what does not.

Lt. Gen. William Lord, the Air Force chief information officer, said cyberattackers have shifted their tactics from trying to breach firewalls to penetrating applications and said the service has serious application vulnerabilities.

Lord said unspecified cyber enemies used to be banging away at our firewalls. They're not any longer. "The enemy is banging away at our applications," the Air Force News Service reported on Wednesday.

Lord, speaking to a business group at the Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., said the service's applications have been shown vulnerable to such attacks. The Air Force has more than 19,000 information technology applications, Lord said. The center's IT Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex in Alabama examined about 200 of those apps and found "all of them had over 50 vulnerabilities," he said.

Lord said the Air Force needs to focus on IT security but not at the expense of usefulness. "Security without utility is of little value; and utility without security is far too dangerous," he said, emphasizing the service needs to strike the correct balance between the two.

We all know the old joke, if you want to find an Air Force base, look for a golf course. It turns out managing all those courses worldwide -- 65 in all -- is such a complex task, the service has decided it needs some software to keep track of all the details.

The Air Force is not looking for plain vanilla golf course management software, either. No siree. In a notice posted on FedBizOps July 16, the Air Force Services Agency said it wanted to acquire some spiffy Golf Enterprise Solution software that "will leverage the commercial sector's best practices with the intent to transform [Air Force golf] into more efficient operations and potential cost savings."

The software will help manage rounds of golf played, pro-shops, fleets of golf carts, driving ranges, equipment rentals, food and beverage operations, and lounges.

The Air Force wants Golf Enterprise Solution software that will provide "automated, centralized reporting to allow geographically dispersed golf facilities to automatically report financial and operational data" and support XML data interchange with the Golf Handicap Information Network.

Because every systems integrator nationwide has at least one retired Air Force duffer general on staff, I bet this is a procurement that will attract a lot of interest. The request for proposals is due out Friday.

D'Val Westphal, the "Road Warrior" correspondent for my local paper, the Albuquerque Journal, had a insightful column on Monday on why we should never, ever fully trust Google maps to get directions.

The Albuquerque International Sunport -- the grandiloquent name for the local airport that has no international flights -- adjoins and shares runways with Kirtland Air Fore Base.

If you use Google Maps to get directions from Santa Fe to the airport, you'll be taken not to the airport terminal but to the front gate of Kirtland, Westphal pointed out in her article. (Subscription required.)

A bemused security guard at Kirtland kept wondering why panicked tourists rushing to make a flight kept ending up at his post. The guard soon discovered they all had been misdirected by Google, Westphal said.

The unnamed guard then went online to fix the Google Map problem. That worked for about a week until Google reverted to its old ways and, once again, guided folks to Kirtland.

Westphal then called Google, to little avail, because, well, as you know, the telephone and Alexander Graham Bell are so 19th century.

Maybe the column will finally spur Google to stop funneling innocents the wrong way to the Sunport. Kudos to Westphal and the security guard at Kirtland for taking the human approach to solve a digital problem.

Ask anyone to identify America's first black aviators, and they would undoubtedly cite the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, including Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., who went on to become the first African American Air Force General.

But, as I just found out after reading Charles Glass' Americans in Paris, a fascinating account of Americans caught in Paris after the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the honor of the first black aviator goes to Eugene Jacques Bullard. Raised in Columbus, Ga., he moved to Europe to escape prejudice before the start of World War I.

Bullard joined the French Foreign Legion when World War I broke out, served in the French Army's 170th Infantry Regiment, was wounded twice at the battle of Verdun, and was awarded France's highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre.

While recuperating in Paris in 1916, Bullard took a bet from a fellow American that he could not get into the fledging French Air Force. He won the bet, and after training, in August 1917, started flying patrols in a Spad biplane through the end of the war on Nov. 11, according to Narayan Sengupta in an excerpt from his book American Eagles, a history of American aviators in World War I.

After the war, Bullard settled in Paris, opened a jazz club and in the 1930s was recruited by French intelligence to spy on Germans who frequented the club. In June 1940, as the Germans neared Paris, the 45-year-old Ballard hiked to the edge of the city to join his old French ground unit, the 170th Infantry Regiment, to help repel the German advance.

In 1954, French President Charles de Gaulle honored Ballard's service by asking him, along with two French veterans, to light the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He died in 1961, with his service all but forgotten.

As we get ready to honor on Memorial Day all Americans who have answered the call to defend liberty, it's good to remember the motto Ballard painted on his biplane: "All Blood Runs Red."

As we get ready to honor those who served and died for this country on Memorial Day, the New Mexico Department of Veterans' Services will take care of some forgotten veterans: those who died with no known family to bury them.

Through its Forgotten Heroes Burial Program, the department -- in cooperation with the Veterans Affairs Department, the Santa Fe National Cemetery and New Mexico's 33 counties -- has stepped up to become the "family" of these servicemen ignored in death.

Ray Seva, spokesman for the veterans' services department, said it became aware of the issue this year after Thaddeus Lucero, the manager for Bernalillo County, informed them that no family member had stepped forward to claim the remains of 14 veterans despite repeated attempts by the county and its medical investigator office to locate relatives.

John Garcia, the secretary at veterans' services, said unclaimed remains of veterans are a national problem. "It's extremely disheartening to hear that there are thousands of unclaimed cremated remains of veterans nationwide," he said.

Seva told me that the 14 veterans will be buried with full military honors on June 4 at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. They are:

Charles Walker Curlee, Army
Patrick Faudi, Air Force, Korean War
Wesley D. Fontaine, Army
John Thomson, Marines
Carl N. Peterson, Navy, Korean War
Howard Fried, Army, WW II
Patrick Ford, Air Force
Donald K. James, Army, Vietnam War
Clovis Walker, Air Force
Lonny Douglas Greg, Navy, Vietnam War
Norman Stiver, Air Force, Vietnam War
Carleton Crouch, Air Force, Vietnam War
William Bailly, branch and date of service unknown
John Mercado, branch and date of service unknown

Garcia said, "All fallen veterans deserve to be treated with respect because they sacrificed to serve and protect our country. We are now pleased to be able to do this for those veterans who have been forgotten in the end."