&en A r m e n 1946-1 994 Gerald T. Cantwell AIR PROGRAM 1997 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationD ata Cantwell, Gerald T., d. 1994. Citizen airmen : a history of the Air Force Reserve, 1946-1994 / Gerald T. Cantwell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States. Air Force Reserve-History. I. Title. UG853.C36 1997 95-44624 359.4’1 37’0973-DC20 CIP The Air Force Reserve received its first F-16s (shown being refueled, front cover) in January 1984. The C-5 (top image, back cover) came into the Reserve’s strategic airlift force in December 1984; C-141s (middle image, back cover) came in July 1986. Tactical airlift groups obtained C-130s (lower left, back cover) in this same Total Force period of the 1980s. All aircraft images are from the photograph col- lection maintained by the 1l th Communications Squadron, Andrews AFB, Maryland. For sale by the US. Government Printing Oftice Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328 ISBN 0-1 6-049269-6 . . . to the ”Eighty-five Percenters” The Reservists: ”pure, downtown, of-base” FOREWORD For nearly fifty years, citizen airmen have served in the nation’s defense as members of the Air Force Reserve. Citizen Airmen: A History of the Air Force Reserve, 1946-1994 begins with the fledgling air reserve program initiated in 1916, traces its progress through World War 11, and then concen- trates on the period 1946 through 1994. The study skillfully describes the process by which a loosely organized program evolved into today’s impressive force. The Air Force Reserve story is told within the context of national political and military policy and stresses that over the decades, as national needs have increased, reservists have met the challenges. Initially, the Air Force treated its reserve units as supplemental forces and equipped them with surplus equipment. Shortly after the Air Force Reserve was established in 1948, its members mobilized for Korean War duty and they served throughout the conflict. The Reserve program subsequently fell into disarray and required patient rebuilding. The passage of a series of key federal laws related to personnel issues and the introduction of the air reserve technician program greatly assisted in this rejuvenation process. In the 1960s, the Air Force Reserve demonstrated its mettle as it participated in numerous mobilizations reflecting the Cold War tensions of the era. Reservists were involved in operations ranging from the Berlin Crisis of 1961-1962 to the Southeast Asia mobilizations in 1968. In the 1970s, the Air Force Reserve program assumed heightened importance when the Department of Defense adopted the Total Force Policy. This concept treated the active forces, the National Guard, and all reserve forces as an integrated force. Reservists were now expected to meet the same readiness standards as their active duty counterparts. Since then, the Air Force Reserve has demonstrated its ability to perform a wide variety of missions. Air Reservists participated in American military operations in Grenada and Panama. During DESERTS HIELDan d STORMs, ome 23,500 reservists were mobilized for service. They performed in combat in the Persian Gulf and provided vital support services at overseas locations. Stateside, they served at home stations or other locations in place of deployed active duty personnel. Today, the Air Force Reserve performs major portions of the Air Force mission. Reservists are equipped with front-line weapons systems and have supported United Nations operations in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Iraq. V The Air Force Reserve They have exclusive responsibility for aerial spray operations and weather reconnaissance and they contribute large portions of the airlift and rescue missions. Reservists may also be found performing humanitarian medical missions and varied nation-building projects. The book’s author, Gerald T. Cantwell, passed away in 1994, before he could see the work through final publication. He brought to the study a wealth of knowledge-he served as the Air Force Reserve Command Historian for nearly twenty years-and a continuing desire to bring the Reserve story to a wider public. The account stands as but one example of his dedication to this purpose. His former colleagues, Dr. Charles F. O’Connell, Jr., Dr. Kenneth C. Kan, Ms. Margaret L. MacMackin, and Mr. Christiaan J. Husing, dedicate their contributions to Mr. Cantwell’s volume in his memory. RICHARD P. HALLION Air Force Historian vi PREFACE Lt. Col. William R. Berkeley, an Air Force information officer with whom I enjoyed consecutive tours at two headquarters when Air Force historians were assigned to the information function as the 1950s turned into the 1960s, used to talk about the Air Force Reserve’s many “publics” and our obligation to explain the component to them. These publics included the reservist’s neighbors, his church, his employer, his co-workers, members of the active Air Force, his family, and, above all, the reservists themselves. Each public was in some way puzzled, and often irritated, by a reservist’s behavior, because it often set him apart from normal community activities. Neighbors andcongregations wondered about this person among them who came and went in military uniform; employers denied, or only grudgingly approved, absences required by annual military encampments; members of the active force derided the reservist as an occasional and amateur soldier; his family resented the lost vacations, late hours, and weekends that took their family member away from them; and the reservist himself had his own questions, not the least of which was why the active force treated the Air Force Reserve program and its members as country cousins while giving the Air National Guard the best equipment and missions. Fifteen years later, those publics that Bill talked about were still out there with the same unanswered questions. This was especially so as the nation recovered from the trauma of its Southeast Asia experience. My intent in writing this book is to answer those questions for the reservist and all his publics. The book’s concept is to discuss these problems in terms of changing national policy. Planning for employment of the post-World War I1 Air Force Reserve was seldom precise or prescient, and funding was often limited. Nevertheless, as one of the two civilian components of the Air Force (the other being the Air National Guard), the component was active in the nation’s defense through thirty-five years and seven presidential administrations. In the early 1950s, when President Harry S. Truman committed the nation to war in Korea to support the United Nations in its first major challenge, the Air Force Reserve provided the necessary augmentation while the skimpy active force rebuilt itself under wartime conditions. During the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961), the component became a training force vii The Air Force Reserve for reservists with no prior military service. The experienced troop carrier force meanwhile provided actual peacetime airlift missions for the Air Force. In the fall of 196 1, the Soviets threatened to deny the United States access to Berlin. President John F. Kennedy mobilized reserve units of all the services including five Air Force Reserve transport groups as he bought time to rebuild and restructure the active forces. A year later, when Soviet offensive missiles appeared in Cuba, the Air Force Reserve helped deploy an invasion force to the southeast corner of the United States. Then, as the crisis deepened, the President mobilized eight reserve troop carrier wings and supporting aerial port units to participate in the apparently inevitable invasion of Cuba. Assembly of the invasion force, including the recall of citizen airmen to participate, demonstrated U.S. resolve and contributed to a resolution of the crisis short of war. During the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969), the Air Force Reserve continued its inactive duty contribution to the nation’s airlift operations and again experienced partial mobilization as the war in Southeast Asia ground on. Volunteer air reservists participated in U.S. airlift operations into the Dominican Republic during the revolution there in 1965, and at about the same time that Air Force Reserve troop carrier units took over Atlantic coast airlift operations from the active force, the heavier air transport units began flights into Southeast Asia that continued until war’s end. Reservists on inactive duty participated in all of the war’s major airlifts, including the repatriation of U.S. prisoners of war and the evacuation of refugees and U.S. personnel from Vietnam. On the other side of the world, in 1973 volunteer reserve aircrews flew hundreds of missions into the Middle East during the Arab-Israeli conflict. As an aftermath of the Southeast Asia experience, President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) did away with the draft and established the reserve forces as the primary source of augmentation in future military contingencies. His administration also began the process of integrating the reserve forces more completely into defense plans. Becoming President in 1977, Jimmy Carter continued the process of defining the role of the reserve forces more precisely and of integrating them into war and mobilization plans. Consequently, the Air Force Reserve, units and individuals, began to participate in deployments to overseas locations where plans called for them to fight upon mobilization. Along the way, the Air Force took three significant steps which stimulated the development of the Air Force Reserve as an active part of the total operational Air Force. In 1957 it authorized implementation of the Air Reserve technician program which provided the reserve units management and training continuity. In 1968, far more than the other services, the Air Force conscien- tiously applied Public Law 90-168 which called for the creation of the Office of the Chief of Air Force Reserve, among other provisions to strengthen management and advocacy of the Air Force Reserve. Finally, long before the ... Vlll Preface Defense Department adopted the concept as national policy, the Air Force embarked on its own Total Force, under which, fully integrated with the active force in matters of programming, planning, equipping, and training, the air reserve components made a proportionate contribution to peacetime operations as they prepared for mobilization. Air Force Chief of Staff General David C. Jones could assert unequivocally that the Air Force Reserve was simply “part’’ of the Air Force. This is a story about the Air Force Reserve, not the Air Force’s civilian components and auxiliaries generally. It touches upon the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps at isolated points only insofar as the commentary would be awkward if their contributions were to be omitted. Since the record presented here deals solely with a national force, it includes no mention of individual state militia nor national guard policies. Also, as an account that focuses on the component itself, management agencies, the Continental Air Command, and Headquarters Air Force Reserve are mentioned only when such a discussion is essential to the flow of the narrative. All history is to some extent revisionist and presented from the peculiar perspective of the author. Honesty to my readers requires some indication of my stance on some of the issues the book discusses. I agree with the late, very popular historian, Barbara W. Tuchman when she declared that there is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. “Without an opinion, a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides,” she said. Elsewhere she wrote that it was better that her bias stuck out than be hidden; it could then be taken into account. “To take no sides in history,” she wrote, “would be as false as to take no sides in life.” I could not spend a quarter of a century as a contemporary historian in management headquarters of the Air Force Reserve without having acquired certain biases. The most pervasive of these is my belief that many failures in managing and administering Air Force Reserve programs resulted from the failure of the active Air Force, which is to say the Air Staff and the major gaining commands, to fully ascertain the nature of the reservist as an immobile citizen for whom reserve participation is a patriotic avocation. That is why the establishment of the Office of Air Force Reserve under a reservist was so important. I hasten to add, however, that this has not led me to share the paranoiac belief held by some Air Force Reserve officials as an article of faith that the active force is out to persecute the reserves. Foremost among the unknowing on the Air Staff is the manpower community. Blinded by an addiction to numbers that surpasses even that of the accountants in the budget world, the Air Force’s manpower officials have created some disharmony in forcing structures that mirror the active force upon reserve organizations which really did not have the same peacetime role as the active force units. Almost equally dominant in my view of things is my belief that the staff of the Office of the Air Force Reserve is permitted to take a too active role in ix