by Dale Brown
Leadership Material
( Patrick McLanahan )
Dale Brown
Set in the post-Desert Storm Arabian_Peninsula in March 1991, then-Major McLanahan flies with the Old Dog crew in combating an Iranian Blackjack-E, a version of the Tupolev Tu-160 bomber that was reportedly upgraded with designs lifted from the Megafortress. Meanwhile, back in the US, Col Norman Weir, an officer on the USAF promotions board, reviews McLanahan's service record as a candidate for lieutenant colonel and recommends his discharge. However, the US president orders Weir to destroy the discharge form, saying that McLanahan has proven himself as an officer (without elaborating further). The story was Brown's contribution to Stephen Coonts' Combat war stories anthology. It has peripheral references to Hammerheads and Sky Masters.
Dale Brown
Leadership Material
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Don Aldridge, Lt. General, USAF (ret.), former vice com-mander of the Strategic Air Command, for his help and insights on the inner workings of an Air Force promotion board, and to author and former B-52 radar nav Jim Clonts for his help on living and working on Diego Garcia.
Special thanks to my friends Larry and Maryanne Ingemanson for their generosity.
Leadership Material
March 1997
The alarm goes off at 6 a.m., the clock radio set to a soothing easy-listening music station. Air Force Colonel Norman Weir dresses in a new Nike warm-up suit and runs a couple of miles through the base, returns to his room, then listens to the news on the radio while he shaves, showers, and dresses in a fresh uniform. He walks to the Officers' Club four blocks away and has breakfast-eggs, sausage, wheat toast, orange juice, and coffee-while he reads the morning paper. Ever since his divorce three years earlier, Norman starts every workday exactly the same way.
Air Force Major Patrick S. McLanahan's wake-up call was the clatter of the SATCOM satellite communications transceiver's printer chugging to life as it spit out a long stream of messages onto a strip of thermal printer paper, like a grocery-store checkout receipt gone haywire. He was sitting at the navigator-bombardier's station with his head down on the console, taking a catnap. After ten years flying long-range bombers, Patrick had developed the ability to ignore the demands of his body for the sake of the mission: to stay awake for very long periods of time; sit for long hours without relief; and fall asleep quickly and deeply enough to feel rested, even if the nap only lasted a few minutes. It was part of the survival techniques most combat aircrew members developed in the face of operational necessity.
As the printer spewed instructions, Patrick had his breakfast-a cup of protein milk shake from a stainless-steel Thermos bottle and a couple pieces of leathery beef jerky. All his meals on this long overwater flight were high-protein and low residue-no sandwiches, no veggies, and no fruit. The reason was simple: no matter how high-tech his bomber was, the toilet was still the toilet. Using it meant unfastening all his survival gear, dropping his flight suit, and sitting downstairs nearly naked in a dark, cold, noisy, smelly, drafty compartment. He would rather eat bland food and risk constipation than suffer through the indignity. He felt thankful that he served in a weapon system that allowed its crew members to use a toilet-all of his fighter brethren had to use "piddle packs," wear adult diapers-or just hold it. That was the ultimate indignity.
When the printer finally stopped, he tore off the message strip and read it over. It was a status report request-the second one in the last hour. Patrick composed, encoded, and transmitted a new reply message, then decided he'd better talk to the aircraft commander about all these requests. He safetied his ejection seat, unstrapped, and got to his feet for the first time in what felt like days.
His partner, defensive systems officer Wendy Tork, Ph.D. was sound asleep in the right seat. She had her arms tucked inside her shoulder Straps so she wouldn't accidentally trigger her ejection handles-there had been many cases of sleeping crew members dreaming about a crash and punching themselves out of a perfectly good aircraft-her flying gloves on, her dark helmet visor down, and her oxygen mask on in case they had an emergency and she had to eject with short notice. She had her summerweight flight jacket on over her flight suit, with the flotation-device harness on over that, the bulges of the inflatable pouches under her armpits making her arms rise and fall with each deep sleepy breath.
Patrick scanned Wendy's defensive-systems console before moving forward-but he had to force himself to admit that he paused there to look at Wendy, not the instruments. There was something about her that intrigued him-and then he stopped himself again. Face it, Muck, Patrick told himself: You're not intrigued-you're hot for her. Underneath that baggy flight suit and survival gear is a nice, tight, luscious body, and it feels weird, naughty, almost wrong to be thinking about stuff like this while slicing along forty-one thousand feet across the Gulf of Oman in a high-tech warbird. Weird, but exciting.
At that moment, Wendy raised the helmet's dark visor, dropped her oxygen mask, and smiled at him. Damn, Patrick thought as he quickly turned his attention to the defensive-systems console, those eyes could melt titanium.
"Hi," she said. Even though she had to raise her voice to talk cross-Cockpit, it was still a friendly, pleasant, disarming sound. Wendy Tork, Ph.D., was one of the world's most renowned experts in electromagnetic engineering and systems development, a pioneer in the use of computers to analyze energy waves and execute a particular response. They had been working together for nearly two years at their home base, the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC) at Groom Lake Air Station, Nevada, known as Dreamland.
"Hi," he said back. "I was just… checking your systems. We're going over the Bandar Abbass horizon in a few minutes, and I wanted to see if you were picking up anything."
"The system would've alerted me if it detected any signals within fifteen percent of detection threshold," Wendy pointed out. She spoke in her usual hypertechnical voice, female but not feminine, the way she usually did. It allowed Patrick to relax and stop thinking thoughts that Were so out of place to be thinking in a warplane. Then, she leaned forward in her seat, closer to him, and asked, "You were looking at me, weren't you?"
The sudden change in her voice made his heart skip a beat and his mouth grow dry as arctic air. "You're nutty," he heard himself blurt out. Boy, did that sound nutty!
"I saw you though the visor, Major Hot Shot," she said. "I could see you looking at me." She sat back, still looking at him. "Why were you looking at me?"
"Wendy, I wasn't…"
"Are you sure you weren't?"
"I… I wasn't…" What is going on? Patrick thought. Why am I so damned tongue-tied? I feel like a school kid who just got caught drawing pictures of the girl he had a crush on in his notebook.
Well, he did have a crush on her. They'd first met about three years ago when they were both recruited for the team that was developing the Megafortress flying battleship. They had a brief, intense sexual encounter, but events, circumstances, duties, and responsibilities always prevented anything more from happening. This was the last place and time he would've guessed their relationship might take a new, exciting step forward.
"It's all right, Major," Wendy said. She wouldn't take her eyes off him, and he felt as if he wanted to duck back behind the weapons bay bulkhead and stay there until they landed. "You're allowed."
Patrick found himself able to breathe again. He relaxed, trying to look cool and casual even though he could feel sweat oozing from every pore. He held up the SATCOM printer tape. "I've got… we've got a message… orders… instructions," he stammered, and she smiled both to chide him and to enjoy him at the same time. "From Eighth Air Force. I
was going to talk to the general, then everybody else. On interphone. Before we go over the horizon. The Iranian horizon."
"You do that, Major," Wendy said, a laugh in her eyes. Patrick nodded, glad that was over with, and started to head for the cockpit. She stopped him with, "Oh, Major?"
Patrick turned back to her. "Yes, Doctor?"
"You never told me."
"Told you what?"
"Do all my systems look OK to you?"
Thank God she smiled after that, Patrick thought-maybe she doesn't think I'm some sort of pervert. Regaining a bit of his lost composure, but still afraid to let his eyes roam over her "systems," he replied, "They look great to me, Doc."
"Good," she said. "Thank you." She smiled a bit more warmly, let her eyes look him up and down, and added, "I'll be sure to keep an eye on your systems too."
Patrick never felt more relieved, and yet more naked, as he bent to crawl through that connecting tunnel and make his way to the cockpit.
But just before he announced he was moving forward and unplugged his intercom cord, he heard the slow-paced electronic "DEEDLE… DEEDLE. . DEEDLE…" warning tone of the ship's threat-detection system. They had just been highlighted by enemy radar.
Patrick virtually flew back into his ejection seat, strapped in, and unsafed his ejection seat. He was in the aft crew compartment of an EB-52C Megafortress bomber, the next generation of "flying battleships" Patrick's classified research unit was hoping to produce for the Air Force. It was once a "stock" B-52H Stratofortress bomber, the workhorse of America's long-range heavy-bombardment fleet, built for long range and heavy nuclear and nonnuclear payloads. The original B-52 was designed in the 1950s; the last rolled off the assembly line twenty years ago. But this plane was different. The original airframe had been rebuilt from the ground up with state-of-the-art technology not just to modernize it, but to make it the most advanced warplane… that no one had ever heard of.
"Wendy?" he radioed on interphone. "What do we got?"
"This is weird," Wendy responded. "I've got a variable PRF X-band target out there. Switching between antiship and antiaircraft search pro-flies. Estimated range… damn, range thirty-five miles, twelve o'clock. He's right on top of us. Well within radar-guided missile range."
"Any idea what it is?"
"Could be an AWACS plane," Wendy replied. "He looks like he's scanning both surface and air targets. No fast PRFs-just scanning. Faster than an APY scan, like on an E-2 Hawkeye or E-3 Sentry, but same profile."
"An Iranian AWACS?" Patrick asked. The EB-52 Megafortress was flying in international airspace over the Gulf of Oman, just west of the Iranian coastline and just south of the Strait of Hormuz, outside the Persian Gulf. The director of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, had ordered three of his experimental Megafortress bombers to start patrolling the skies near the Persian Gulf to provide a secret, stealthy punch in case one of the supposedly neutral countries in the region decided to jump into the conflict raging between the Coalition forces and the Republic of Iraq.
"Could be a 'Mainstay' or 'Candid,' " Patrick offered. "One of the aircraft Iraq supposedly surrendered to Iran was an Ilyushin-76MD airborne early-warning aircraft. Maybe the Iranians are trying out their new toy. Can he see us?"
"I think he can," Wendy said. "He's not locking on to us, just scanning around-but he's close, and we're approaching detection threshold." The B-52 Stratofortress was not designed or ever considered a "stealth" aircraft, but the EB-52 Megafortress was much different. It retained most of the new antiradar technology it had been fitted with as an experimental test-bed aircraft-nonmetallic "fibersteel" skin, stronger and lighter than steel but nonradar-reflective; swept-back control surfaces instead of straight edges; no external antennas; radar-absorbent material used in the engine inlets and windows; and a unique radar-absorbing energy system that retransmitted radar energy along the airframe and discharged it back along the wing trailing edges, reducing the amount of radar energy reflected back to the enemy. It also carried a wide variety of weapons and could provide as much firepower as a flight of Air Force or Navy tactical fighters.
"Looks like he's 'guarding' the Strait of Hormuz, looking for inbound aircraft," Patrick offered. "Heading two-three-zero to go around him. If he spots us, it might get the Iranians excited."
But he had spoken too late: "He can see us," Wendy cut in. "He's at thirty-five miles, one o'clock, high, making a beeline for us. Speed increasing to five hundred knots."
"That's not an AWACS plane," Patrick said. "Looks like we picked up some kind of fast-moving patrol plane."
"Crap," the aircraft commander, Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, swore on intercom. Elliott was the commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, also known as Dreamland, and the developer of the EB-52 Megafortress flying battleship. "Shut his radar down, Wendy, and let's hope he thinks he has a bent radar and decides to call it a night."
"Let's get out of here, Brad," Patrick chimed in. "No sense in risking a dogfight up here."
"We're in international airspace," Elliott retorted indignantly. "We have as much right to be up here as this turkey."
"Sir, this is a combat area," Patrick emphasized. "Crew, let's get ready to get the hell out of here."
With one touch, Wendy ordered the Megafortress's powerful jammers to shut down the Iranian fighter's search radar. "Trackbreakers active," Wendy announced. "Give me ninety left." Brad Elliott put the Megafortress in a tight right turn and rolled out perpendicular to the fighter's flight path. The plane's pulse-Doppler radar might not detect a target with a zero relative closure rate. "Bandit at three o'clock, thirty-five miles and steady, high. Moving to four o'clock. I think he lost us."
"Not so fast," the crew mission commander and copilot, Colonel John Ormack, interjected. Ormack was HAWC's deputy commander and chief engineering wizard, a commander pilot with several thousand hours in various tactical aircraft. But his first love was computers, avionics, and gadgets. Brad Elliott had the ideas, but he relied on Ormack to turn those ideas into reality. If they gave badges or wings for techno-geeks, John Ormack would wear them proudly. "He might be going passive. We've got to put some distance between us and him. He might not need a radar to intercept us."
"I copy that," Wendy said. "But I think his IRSTS is out of range. He…"
At that moment, they all heard a loud, faster-paced "DEEDLE DEEDLE DEEDLE!" warning on the intercom. "Airborne interceptor locked on, range thirty miles and closing fast! His radar is huge-he's burning right through my jammers. Solid radar lock, closure rate… closure rate moving to six hundred knots!"
"Well," John Ormack said, "at least that water down there is warm even this time of year."
Making jokes was the only thing any of them could think about right then-because being highlighted by a supersonic interceptor alone over the Gulf of Oman was just about the most fatal thing a bomber crew could ever face.
This morning was a little different for Norman Weir. Today and for the next two weeks Weir and several dozen of his fellow Air Force full colonels were at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, for a lieutenant colonel's promotion board. Their task: pick the best, the brightest, and the most highly qualified from a field of about three thousand Air Force majors to be promoted to lieutenant colonel.
Colonel Norman Weir knew a lot about making choices using complex objective criteria-a promotion board was right up his alley. Norman was commander of the Air Force Budget Analysis Agency at the Pentagon. His job was to do exactly what he was now being asked to do: sift through mountains of information on weapon and information systems and decide the future life-cycle costs and benefits of each. In effect, he and his staff of sixty-five military and civilian analysts, accountants, and technical experts decided the future of the United States Air Force every day. Every aircraft, missile, satellite, computer, "black box," and bomb, along with every man and woman in the Air Force, came under his scrutiny. Every item on ever
y unit's budget had to pass his team's rigorous examination. If it didn't, by the end of the fiscal year it would cease to exist with a single memo to someone in the Secretary of the Air Force's office. He had power and responsibility over billions of dollars every week, and he wielded that power with skill and enthusiasm.
Thanks to his father, Norman decided on a military career in high school. Norman's father was drafted in the mid-sixties but thought it might be safer serving offshore in the Navy, so he enlisted and served as a jet power-plant technician on board various aircraft carriers. He returned from long Pacific and Indian Ocean cruises with incredible stories of aviation heroism and triumph, and Norman was hooked. Norman's father also came home minus half his left arm, the result of a deck munition explosion on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and a Purple Heart. That became Norman's ticket to an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.
But Academy life was hard. To say Norman was merely introverted was putting it mildly. Norman lived inside his own head, existing in a sterile, protected world of knowledge and reflection. Solving problems was an academic exercise, not a physical or even a leadership one. The more they made him run and do push-ups and march and drill, the more he hated it. He failed a physical-conditioning test, was dismissed with prejudice, and returned to Iowa.
His father's almost constant niggling about wasting his appointment and dropping out of the Naval Academy-as if his father had chosen to sacrifice his arm so his son could go to Annapolis-weighed heavily on his mind. His father practically disowned his son, announcing there was no money for college and urging his son to get out and find a job. Desperate to make his father happy, Norman applied and was accepted to Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, receiving a degree in finance and an Air Force commission, becoming an accounting and finance specialist and earning his CPA certification a few months later.