We toiled in mindless, soul-searing, thankless, and mostly unproductive drudgery. When you had to tell someone up “above” how to find your office, the main physical landmark was a ludicrous purple water fountain. It sat at the bottom of the only stairwell that strangers from “above” could understand how to find. All directions to our rat holes referred to that device. Find the purple water fountain, then make so many left turns, so many rights, past this many doorways, to a door marked AFOOP/AD/NA/YUCK.
I had been unhappy to leave Wheelus for an assignment in the Squirrel Cage, but once I accepted my fate I was determined to do my best for God and country. It hadn’t taken long to realize that three-quarters of the droning hours of every day were a total waste of time and that productive moments were devoted to rationalization and justification to Congress for a budget slice. We colonels were the peons. Brigadier generals were the file clerks and horse holders. Major generals, God help them, were the personal aides and boosters for the three-stars, who were lords of the E Ring, who huffed, puffed, and made loud noises as though they knew what air power was all about. These, in turn, convinced the four-stars that data gathered by captains, put together by majors, massaged by lieutenant colonels, fed to colonels, presented to panels, torn apart by boards, rewritten by majors, remassaged by lieutenant colonels, refed to colonels, who recoordinated all over the world (the world, naturally, being that five-sided sorry slab), presented to and finally approved by a board of generals in a form scarcely resembling the original directive, and passed to the poor four-star who had an appointment before the House Armed Services Committee, would justify spending another billion to, once again, restructure the Air Defense Command, which couldn’t possibly keep up with the demise of the vacuum tube and the rapidly expanding capability of the silicon chip in the first place. All that money, amounts beyond comprehension, to do what, against whom, to what end? I got used to referring to one and a half billion as simply 1.5 on briefing charts.
Soon I stopped trying to do all the stuff that came across my desk and started looking around with open eyes. General Bob Petit was there. He was a hell of a guy and a damned fine commander. We’d been together at March Field in ’46. He showed me the project he had been working on: counting up our bomb and bullet supplies all over the world. Bob came to the conclusion that we couldn’t fight a conventional war for more than four months. I don’t remember his exact figures, but they sure as hell impressed me. It was what was behind those figures that got my attention, so I started looking into it. First thing I did within a month of my arrival at the Pentagon was see Colonel Gordie Graham in the TAC Division. I asked him what we had on the drawing board or in production for a replacement fighter for the old F-100. Gordie showed me the specs on the F-105. That was it. The 105’s figures were impressive, but Christ almighty, the damned thing had a bomb bay! It carried a one-megaton nuke in there. The 105 was supposed to take off from a 10,000-foot strip, go 1,000 nautical miles at night on the deck, and deliver that bomb in a driving thunderstorm against some target in Russia. It sure would be a great replacement for the F-100 in that role, but was it a tactical fighter? Could it deal with the most likely form of warfare I was convinced we were still going to fight for years ahead: with bullets and iron bombs? The F-105 proved itself a great fighter-bomber in Southeast Asia a few years later, but at that time the fighter capability seemed minimal.
I went back to Bob Petit with my questions. What kind of R&D is in the works for conventional weapons and delivery systems? Is there any money allocated to build up our munitions reserves? All of his answers were negative or unknowable. For my efforts I was put on some panel or other tasked with future plans. The talk was strictly missiles and nuke delivery requirements, who would hold the bag, and who’d get the lion’s share of the budget. It was clear to me that any system devoted to nukes was a weapon system meant never to be used. If we ever pressed the button and sent a Minuteman into the wild blue yonder, the damned missile wouldn’t have served its real purpose, which was not to be used in the first place. “Peace is our profession” had become the motto of SAC, the strategic air command tall dogs. Seemingly BS, this military stance worked far better than the well-intended efforts of the antinuke soapbox orators and the left-wing liberals. Nuclear warfare did not occur. Holding a mighty big stick was marginally better than disarming yourself, yet it seemed a damned expensive way not to fight.
I started looking into our training programs and found that TAC, under bomber general Walt Sweeny, had cut out all but the merest suggestion of conventional training for fighters. That explained why Gabby Gabreski and his wing were totally unprepared when they were sent to Turkey for the Syrian crisis. At the time Gabby had flown down to Wheelus and, after explaining the situation he faced in Turkey, asked me for help from some of my weapons-training guys. I had said sure, and sent a couple of really sharp captains to Incirlik to show Gabby’s weapons guys how to mix napalm, hang rockets, and set fuses for skip- and dive-bombing … stuff like that. It wasn’t Gabby’s fault. He and his troops hadn’t been allowed to do any of that during their training in the U.S. Yet there they were, sent off to make our presence known in a purely conventional warfare situation. To me, something needed to change. I guess those were the events that started my evolution from a fun-loving young fighter pilot into a worried adult fighter pilot.
Everywhere I looked in the rat hole of the Pentagon convinced me we had damn little conventional capability. The fact that we didn’t was a deliberate course set by the bomber guys who ran things. Yes, we were keeping the Soviet nuclear bear at bay. I don’t deny that. The troops sitting alert all over the world in missile silos and navy guys in subs were doing a superb job, along with all the support people, but the most likely physical threat remained conventional. The need to fight with real bombs and real bullets was staring down our throats. The nuclear threat was real, but the conventional threat was at least as real and a lot more probable. Korea had certainly demonstrated that. Yet here we sat in that goddamn moldy basement breathing the goddamn stale air and doing practically nothing about it.
By early fall of 1959 I was fed up with my lot in the Pentagon. I received an invitation from superintendent Major General William Stone to become the athletic director at the new Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It was tempting. I wanted to run for those hills—anything to escape ADC and the Pentagon. I didn’t care if it meant the end of my career as a fighter pilot. By then, it seemed there was no future left for fighter pilots anyway. Ella was at the end of her rope. After two miscarriages, a stillbirth, and the death of her mother, she was in a severe depression, drinking heavily, and under the care of a psychiatrist. She told me in no uncertain terms that I’d go to Colorado alone. She was staying in Washington with our children. Divorce was imminent. My heart broke but my love for little Chris and Susie and the shreds of my deep love for Ella left me no option. The letter I wrote back to the general at the USAFA explaining why I had to decline his offer was the hardest letter of my life. I would serve my sentence at the Pentagon.
It was a late-November afternoon in 1959. The telephone rang just like clockwork at five o’clock. I picked it up. “Yes, sir, Colonel Olds here.”
“Olds, you and Shiely come up here.”
“Be right there, sir.” I looked over at Al as he was preparing to leave. “Hey, Al, take off that coat. It’s Friday! Guess who needs us where, and it’s not the Russians. It’s the E Ring. Boss’s office.” Al groaned, and we gathered our notepads and set out to climb those fucking stairs.
This time, it was General Howell Estes. He lost no time getting to the point. He paced back and forth as Al and I made notes of his instructions for the weekend. Shit, there went the sailboat I had rented for the Chesapeake! This wouldn’t be just another Pentagon weekend assignment. Hell no. Finished with his orders, the general waved us away.
It was less tiring going down the ninety-four steps than going up, but the task before us weighed heavily. When we got back to our de
sks, we looked at each other without a word and picked up our respective phones to start calling the troops back to work. As they straggled in, Al and I considered our instructions and how we could go about it. We knew it would take coordination from almost every section of the air staff, just for starters, and then approval would have to be secured from every echelon upward along the way. The general hadn’t given us a deadline but he wanted answers as fast as they could be formulated.
Our task? Change the entire programming for the Air Defense Command for the next six to eight years, drawing the command down from sixty-four squadrons to perhaps five: close bases, transfer people, cancel support actions, close aircraft production lines, transfer mission responsibility to National Guard and Reserve units, and then convince Congress the actions were necessary and worthy of budget approval. We weren’t told how much programmed money we were to generate, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out it would be a bunch. Naturally, we weren’t told what this was all about, but it seemed a tad stronger than the usual, daily Washington drills of “what if?”
Before setting to work on the problem, we placed phone calls to our aggravated wives. Don’t hold dinner. Cancel weekend plans. Sorry, honey. Then each man was assigned the tasks befitting his position on the air staff and told to get to work. I didn’t get home to Georgetown until after midnight, and I lived a lot closer than most of the troops. We were back at it on Saturday morning and continued working, with only Christmas Day off, until the end of March, when we gave our last briefing to Congress. Our group generated a $6.5 billion fund pool, part of which we learned went into the Minuteman missile program, but where the remaining $4 billion went, we had no clue. Five years later, I found it had gone to the SR-71 Blackbird and considered it money well spent.
After all the endless nights and weekends in the Pentagon, the general never thanked us. I guess it wasn’t in his nature. I was glad we never worked together in a flying situation. A year after this, when I was assigned to a position on the Joint Staff, I passed him in the hall in the E Ring. He was walking in the other direction and, without breaking stride, started giving me orders for another job. I turned, interrupted him, and announced that I no longer worked for him. I didn’t say where and I guess he didn’t give a damn. He just uttered a loud “Harrumph!” and walked away. I was utterly relieved to be moving on.
I worked for then–major general Maurice Preston, who was in charge of operations in the office of the deputy chief of staff of the USAF. Two or three visits to General Preston’s office left me unable to tell if the Old Man was always chewing me out or giving me fatherly advice. It was hard not to stare at his missileer badge as he constantly told me I was living in the past. When I last visited his office, armed with statistics to prove my point, the Old Man finally blew. He told me I just wanted to put on my leather jacket and white scarf, pull down my goggles, and go out and do battle with the Red Baron. He explained things weren’t that way anymore. This was the modern age. No more iron bombs and .50 caliber bullets. No more dogfighting. He told me my studies trying to prove we didn’t have any conventional capability left in our United States Air Force were a waste of time. He claimed we didn’t need bombs and bullets and conventional training programs for fighter pilots. He said we didn’t need to make formation takeoffs and overhead landing breaks, and we didn’t need to pay too much attention to the close air support mission I was harping about. Then he looked right at me and pointed his finger. He told me to get it through my head and understand we would never fight a conventional war again. Never! Then he ordered me to get back to my desk to take care of matters that concerned my job. If the director of operations of the United States Air Force was saying that, what was coming from topside?
But I knew damned well what was happening. Who had been the chief since Vandenberg? Who was sitting in the front offices on the E Ring? Who had plans, operations, personnel, installations, and the budget? Who was running the air force? It was the B-17, B-24, and B-29 guys that carpet-bombed Europe and dropped the nukes on Japan and who had parlayed themselves to the top at the expense of the navy, the army, the marines, and our AF tactical forces. It was hard to argue against success. No one had dropped nukes since ’45 and the whole world appreciated it, but we had enough warheads to destroy the world three times over. How dead is dead? The only real fighting we’d done since ’45 had been in Korea with bombs, bullets, and airlift. How could that be ignored? We were no longer ready to fight like that, and no one seemed to notice.
One memorable Joint Chiefs morning in 1961, I trudged upstairs with my colonel boss for yet another important meeting. The colonel was a nice fellow: a phlegmatic, unflappable, pipe-smoking, slightly chubby, uninspiring type of staff officer who sailed through the tensions and demands of each day without visible upset. He looked a little like a dieting Oliver Hardy, complete with a scrap of a mustache. He was a good guy to all of us. I liked him and had the gall to think I understood him. I guess he knew that enough crap came floating down from above to keep the rest of us docile and downtrodden, so he ran the air defense shop with a steady, quiet hand.
I smiled to myself thinking of the briefing papers I held under my arm as the two of us plodded up those hated stairs. Today was going to be something new and totally different. I was going to take my far-out thoughts before the high and mighty, and I wasn’t at all sure of the reception I would get. Neither was my boss. He was already projecting an attitude of detachment, one that would convey the impression he was with me only because he was my boss and his presence didn’t necessarily mean he endorsed the ideas I was presenting. Well, OK. That was par for the course.
Some weeks previously, a small group of us had been charged to perform a study on the future structure of North American Air Defense. At least that’s what we thought. Al Shiely and Marty Martin, two West Point classmates, plus some other officers under the benign and bemused guidance of a fine general named Randy Holzapple, had met, scratched our collective heads, floundered around, sought to get a grip on the real threat to the United States that the air force was charged to defend, and wondered whether to simply build or to destroy current forces.
To me, the obvious threat was simple: nuclear weapons in the hundreds. Deadly, hulking, menacing weapons controlled by pawns in the world power struggle. The nukes created mass paranoia. They were proliferating everywhere: burrowing into the earth, sliding under the seas, clustered in bomb bays, and slung under fighter wings sitting on alert pads around the globe. They were restrained and chained, but ready to respond to the superegos of a handful of evil vodka-fueled men holding court in an onion-towered fortress, men who held power through fear, who used their hatred of other nations to control people and divert attention from their own miserable existence. It was a caricature surely, but it couldn’t be far from reality.
There had to be a way to obviate the nuke horror, something that would break the stalemate and give America an undeniable edge in the mutuality of deterrence, of massive retaliation, of graduated response, of the “first strike” option, and in the ridiculous international game: “I have more nukes than you have.” “Oh no you don’t! Mine are hidden in the mountains and under the plains.” “Well, you don’t know about the ones I have under the ice cap.” “Yes I do. And my attack subs will wipe them out the minute I say GO.” And so on, like schoolchildren playing with loaded pistols, only in this case with the whole of civilization at stake.
Once started, there seemed no way to reverse the trend. It was a fact of life. The only way to ban the bomb was to have more and better nukes than the bad guys, to be ready to use them at a moment’s notice, but to have them under absolutely airtight control so that no one individual or group of individuals could possibly break security and launch one of the damned things. Of course, all of those procedures were highly classified. But oddly enough, we had to make sure the Russians knew of those measures and had as much confidence in them as we did. Otherwise, they might get nervous and figure they’d better launch firs
t before someone on our side went berserk and punched the button. Naturally, the reverse was true, but no one had ever reassured me about it. Maybe that was why the Big Boys had such large desks and thick rugs. Someone had to know.
No soapbox oratory, no unilateral disarmament, no tricky antimissile missiles (like outfielders trying to shag a hundred fly balls all at once), none of that seemed to me to be the answer. My thinking was that the only way to make the threat go away would be to catch the enemy missiles on the rise and their aircraft on the runway. That concept presupposed not just the means to do so, but the existence of a technology demonstrating that the idea itself was feasible and worthy of development. It meant using space as the medium. It would be necessary to sit above, and to shoot down a missile the moment the silo doors opened, to catch the threat on launch. It meant both having the capability to do this and making sure the enemy knew we would do it. It also meant we would control the use of space for whatever reason someone wanted to launch anything. It was a Buck Rogers, science-fiction, block-’em-from-space kind of idea, but why not? Stranger things had been conceived and done.
So I did what research I could, checked the archives, asked questions, sought to find out if anything along my line of thought had been considered. I found nothing. Taking the bull by the horns, I decided to attempt to write a national doctrine for the military use of space. I convinced our Air Defense study group that was the way to go and was assigned the task of creating the document. Some of my contemporaries thought I had lost my mind. Yet NASA had recently introduced the Mercury astronauts, and our space capabilities seemed on the verge of serious development. We would have to start somewhere, so I wrote a paper rather grandly titled “A National Strategy for the Military Use of Space.”
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