Military Brothers: Eleven Brothers in One Family Choose Military Careers, Three Choose Air Force

MILITARY BROTHERS

Eleven brothers in one family choose military careers, three choose AF

BY RANDY ROUGHTON

27 July 2015

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated service. (Courtesy photo)

On Ben and Hattie Davis’ farm in Wetumpka, Alabama, their 16 children learned the value of family and hard work. But they also learned they wanted something more for their own lives, a realization that led 11 sons into the military, including three who chose the Air Force. The service was an escape for Arguster, Eddie and Julius Davis, whether from a life of little promise in their small, central Alabama town during the 1950s or from an Army draft notice during wartime.
“I thought the farm life was hard at the time, but it taught us all great lessons like how hard work pays off,” Arguster said. “But that was the type of work none of us boys wanted to continue. The military was an escape for all of us boys. Our options were to stay and work on the farm, which we didn’t want to do, find a minimum wage job in the area where we lived, or try to move to some city where we didn’t know anybody. I think the military gave us the opportunity to earn money and grow up a little bit, to be out on our own, and was a great steppingstone for many of us. I know it was for me.”
The Davis brothers’ parents had one goal for their children – to finish high school, because their father didn’t make it past the third grade, and their mother only made it to the ninth grade. Each brother graduated, and three earned college degrees. Military careers made secondary education possible for several of them.

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated servic(Courtesy photo #2)

The 11 brothers served a combined 158 years in the military, beginning with Ben Jr., now 88, who gave 33 years of service. Other than the three Airmen, seven served in the Army, including the late Washington Davis, and two had Navy careers. Edward, the second-oldest brother, became the family’s first Airman when he enlisted in 1951. Unlike his brothers, Edward lived his teen years with his natural mother and grandmother in Pittsburgh. After high school, he was working with the Pennsylvania Railroad and was trying to get into college when he enlisted in the Air Force to avoid getting drafted into the Army.
“We have one uncle who is a Pearl Harbor survivor, Thomas Davis, in Montgomery,” said Edward, now 85. “At the time I was going to (Elmore County Training School), he was in the Navy during World War II and came back to school. The little kids were so happy to see him. Little by little, as time went along with the situation in Alabama, the military became an option because for a lot of them, it was a matter of going to school or working on the farm. My thing was avoiding the Army because you hear of all that glory in the Air Force.”
Edward completed his certification in preventive medicine at the University of Denver in 1952 and left active duty in 1955. However, he continued his education on the GI Bill while in the Air Force Reserve until his unit was activated for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. A year later,Edward joined the Army and served until his retirement in 1980. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service until 1994, when he worked part time with his wife in a funeral home in Pittsburgh until 2005.
In June 1964, Julius followed his brother into the Air Force and served for almost 12 years when he left as a technical sergeant in 1976. After high school, he had an opportunity for an academic scholarship at Alabama A&M University, but didn’t want to wait. He began his Air Force career in inventory management, but eventually became a procurement advisor, when he was selected for the job at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated service. (Courtesy photo #3)

“It ended up being a family tradition, but we didn’t look at it that way,” said Julius, now 68 and living in Wellington, Florida, where he and his wife own an executive search firm for nuclear utilities. “Growing up in a small town in Alabama in the 1940s and 1950s, there were not many opportunities for black people. We didn’t look at it as a family tradition; it was just a way out. I told a couple of my brothers that I don’t know if any other family accomplished that, having that many brothers go into the military.”
Julius’ education also benefitted from his Air Force career. He used the GI Bill to earn a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in Sacramento.
Even though the youngest Davis brother had seen 10 before him choose the military as an escape from life in Wetumpka, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Arguster would become the 11^th. He was the only brother to go directly to college when he attended Tuskegee Institute after his high school graduation in 1970. But when Arguster returned for the fall semester in 1971, he withdrew and moved to California. After having no luck finding work for three months, Arguster was inducted into the Air Force Nov. 1, 1971, and his first duty station was Carswell Air Force Base, Texas, in vehicle operations. He quickly learned the Air Force would help him reach his goal of returning to college.

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated service. (Courtesy photo #4)

“After about six months there, I found out the Air Force had a tuition assistance program that paid 75 percent of tuition, and I jumped on that immediately,” the 62-year-old said. “I went to evening classes at (Texas Christian University), and they even provided noon classes on base.”
When Arguster left the Air Force four years later, he remained in the area so he could complete his bachelor’s degree in business management.
“So I actually squeezed eight years of living into six by doing four years of active duty and receiving a college degree, and I did all of that without touching my VA benefits,” he said. “I used those VA benefits to earn two associate degrees in auto mechanics and air conditioning and heating.”
Three years after leaving active duty, Arguster joined the Air Force Reserve and served another 19 years before he retired as a senior master sergeant in 1998. He and his wife, Linda, moved back to Alabama in McCalla near Birmingham after he retired from the U.S. Postal Service in 2009.
“Once we saw the ones ahead of us succeeding, we thought, ‘OK, that’s not too bad,’” he said. “You get a place to stay, free meals and clothing, the opportunity to travel, and you make money too. So what more could you ask for? I think the ones who went ahead of us paved the route for a better option to make our lives better.”

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated service. (Courtesy photo #4)

As each brother began to earn money in the military, he picked a project to help the parents back in Wetumpka. The project may have been buying a new refrigerator, installing a bathroom, or putting gas in the house, Arguster said.
The brothers became closer after their father died in 1984, and the mother died in 2001. For years, they selected a destination where they could travel to meet and play golf. Five brothers still live in Alabama, including three who live only about two hours from Arguster in Montgomery.

11 Davis brothers have served 164 years of dedicated service. (Courtesy photo #5)

“We still all talk to one another,” he said. “Within a week’s time after we talk to one of our brothers, we all know how each one is doing, whether we talked to them or not. We really became closer after both of our parents passed. I think that is the way they would have wanted it.”
The brothers who chose the military, whether for a career or as a step in the right direction, remain proud of the decision they made as young adults.

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Making Airmen: MTI pushes trainees through eight weeks of basic training

The blue, round-brimmed hat of the 6-foot-3 military training instructor towers over the unfortunate young trainee who attracted its wearer’s attention. The eyes of the future Airmen on the trainee’s left and right widen as they stand at attention, relieved they aren’t on the receiving end of this specific example of what the MTI calls “the shock and awe effect.”
“Don’t shake your head at the position of attention, trainee,” Tech. Sgt. Chananyah S. Stuart corrects in his distinct Virgin Islands’ accent. “You will pay attention to me, whether you want to or not. You will pay attention to everything I say and everything I’m going to do.”
Later, one of the witnesses of the flight’s first encounter with its MTI, Trainee Charles Stackhouse expressed feelings of apprehension about what Stuart would be like as an instructor.“My first impression of Tech. Sgt. Stuart was a little scary,” said Stackhouse, who would eventually become the flight’s element leader. “I wasn’t exactly intimidated, but it was different from anything I’d ever experienced, and I was definitely nervous.”
Tech. Sgt. Chananyah Stuart reminds a trainee of the procedures for entering the dining facility. Stuart, a 323rd Training Squadron military training instructor, is extra demanding on his trainees from the very beginning because he believes it sets them up for success.
Little do the members of the 323rd Training Squadron’s Flight 552 realize how their impressions of their MTI will change throughout the eight-and-a-half weeks of basic military training at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. By the mid-point of their training, Stackhouse, dorm chief Justin Parker, and others will not only adopt some of their MTI’s favorite sayings like “speed and intensity,” but also his marching cadence, complete with his accent on certain syllables. Flight 552 forms for the first time at about 1 a.m. outside the base’s new BMT Reception Center, located a conveniently short march across the drill pad to the squadron. Stuart is joined by five other MTIs to help “motivate” the flight as he marched them to their home for the next few months.“We will do everything quick, fast and in a hurry,” Stuart tells his new flight. The trainees will soon learn that everything their MTI tells them will include those same three ingredients. The trainees’ night of shock and awe continues as they are introduced to their dormitory. Stuart has a lot of information to give the trainees and only an hour and a half before 2:30 a.m., when they need to be in their bunks with lights out.“Face your wall lockers right now,” he tells them. “Yell out that number. Find the number on your bed right now. Find your security drawer right now.”Later, Stuart gives the 52 trainees one of the biggest lessons they will learn during “zero week,” when he shows them around their dorm. Tech. Sgt. Chananyah Stuart inspects his flight’s dorm after a surprise inspection produced several discrepancies. Flight 552 is in their final week of training, and Stuart, a military training instructor, uses the inspections to fight complacency amongst the trainees. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen)“This is no longer called a bathroom,” Stuart says. “It is the latrine. You are not at home anymore.”The Flight 552 trainees might have been surprised to learn their MTI has not always been comfortable with raising his voice. Stuart learned his MTI package was approved while en route to a deployment in Afghanistan in 2011. The generally soft-spoken civil engineer NCO trained his voice to become accustomed to yelling by the time he reported for MTI duty in June 2012. Stuart’s fellow MTIs have taken notice of the ease with which he transforms from an easygoing gentleman to get into a trainee’s face at the slightest drop in military bearing.“He will be smiling at you one minute, then his face turns to stone like a light switch,” said Staff Sgt. Dennis Weiss, as he watched Stuart counsel a trainee from the “Snake Pit,” the dreaded table where the instructors sit in the dining facility. “All you see is this instant change of face.”Military training instructor, Master Sgt. Julio Alarcon, asks a basic military trainee why he can’t deliver a proper military reporting statement. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen) Stuart is always wearing the stern face when he teaches drill, how to give a reporting statement, the wearing of the uniform, and making dust cover beds because he considers all four indicators of the flight’s progress, as well as for individual trainees.“The beds are the meat and potatoes of the dorm,” Stuart said. “If the beds look good, you know it will be an outstanding flight. If not, you can tell the flight doesn’t have that pride. So you have to be sure you give them that good info.”MTIs must also keep vital flight information accessible at all times. Like all MTIs at Lackland, Stuart must carry a flight notebook whenever he leads a flight. The notebook includes the weekly schedule, flight roster, appointment slips and the white armband roster, which identifies any trainees who are especially susceptible to the heat. Inside Stuart’s hat is a heat chart that tells him what he’s allowed to do with the trainees under conditions that put the squadron under red or black flag. His own water bottle is in one hand or nearby any time he’s outside under the late-summer San Antonio sun. Despite the heat, both from the Texas summer and from their instructor,the flightsurvived zero week, and moved on to the first full week of training, which consists of M-16 weapon identification, breakdown and assembly; maintaining the trainees’ personal living areas and Stuart’s favorite – marching and drill.“Let’s go! You are way too slow for my taste right now,” he yells at one trainee before pulling him out of formation for more intensive drill intervention. Military training instructor, Tech. Sgt. Chananyah Stuart, leads Flight 552 on the “Airman’s Run” in the basic military training reception center auditorium. Stuart keeps his flight in step by calling cadence with his fingers because the noise made by cheering parents and family members make it difficult for trainees to hear him. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen)“We see everything,” Stuart tells the trainee. “If we see something and don’t say anything, it’s probably just because we have given up on that trainee. But we see everything.”Toward the end of the first full week, there is a subtle change in how the instructor barks out orders. He begins to let them in on the reasoning behind the madness, as when he checks to make sure everyone’s buttons are fastened on their Airman battle uniform.“I want to see if you are paying attention to detail,” Stuart tells his flight. “Why? Because many of you will be working on aircraft. If you can’t put that one screw where it’s supposed to go, millions of dollars and some lives go down the drain. This is why we do everything we do, so you can pay attention to detail.” “Right now, they are starting to see the big picture,” Stuart said later. “Because everything we do right now, we relate to the big picture of the operational Air Force.”In the second week of training, as the flight begins classes to prepare for the Basic Expeditionary Airmen Skills Training, which occurs in week six, drill training makes major strides. Stuart teaches marching concepts, such as left and right step, columns left and right, formation of the flight, rest positions, how to count off, and other essential drill concepts. The trainees are also becoming proficient in making their beds the way he taught them, along with their dorm details.“Good to hook?” Stuart asks the flight after teaching them columns left and right, his way of checking for comprehension. Another time, he concludes a correction with, “It’s common sense,” spreading his arms wide to emphasize the point. During week three, trainees receive their name tags and tapes, dog tags and their common access cards, which are kept with their paperwork until they leave BMT. Stuart also teaches them about their military pay. Other than a few infractions, for the most part, Stuart is pleased with the flight’s progress. He can hear the confidence in how they are snapping off their reporting statements.“Every time you do something well that we tell you to do, you’re getting closer to becoming Airmen,” he tells them. Tech. Sgt. Chananyah Stuart, a military training instructor, stands in front of his flight before beginning physical training at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. The flight is in its eighth and final week of Air Force basic military training. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen) By week four, Stuart has the flight moving on to what he likes to call “cruise control.” He no longer has to tell them everything, because they have become self-sufficient in many ways. When a trainee does step out of line, the flight’s leaders often correct the problem without Stuart getting involved.“We use (cruise control) because it’s like having a vehicle training itself,” Stuart said. “It’s like being on auto-pilot and having an airplane go up into the sky, and as soon as it gets into the sky, it begins to fly itself.”The trainees test their endurance, strength and willpower on the obstacle course. They also learn team-building as they cheer each other on as they overcome each of the 20 obstacles. In week five, the trainees have their flight and individual photos taken, and Stuart stresses proper hydration and foot care. He begins pre-deployment preparation for the BEAST the following week, making sure every trainee has items needed from the BEAST Deployment Packing List. He leads the flight in a bag drag, a quick inspection of items needed to take to the BEAST. Once at the BEAST, when trainees get the opportunity to apply what they have learned in a deployed, war-time environment, the flight shows signs of what their MTI taught them through the first four weeks of training. The BEAST includes a weapons familiarization course; firing on the combat arms training and maintenance range; self-aid and buddy care scenarios; training to fight combatives with pugil sticks; and the Creating Leaders, Airmen and Warriors mission, which recently replaced the obstacle course. On the new course, the objectives are considered checkpoints rather than obstacles. The night before the culminating exercise at the end of BEAST week, Stackhouse and Parker enjoy the chance to focus on just being trainees without the burden of leadership duties.“We made a lot of mistakes in the first exercise, and it gradually got better,” Parker said. “All we could do was pinpoint those things we were still having trouble with and work on them.”At the end of week six, members of Flight 552 and several other flights in Sentinel, their living area zone, captures the BEAST Excellence Award by earning the fewest demerits in the culminating exercise. The award gives the flight 10 points toward becoming honor flight. A week later, Stuart learns the flight has won honor flight, making Flight 552 the top flight of all those graduating BMT that week. Honor flights traditionally receive an extra town pass during graduation week. Military training instructor, Tech. Sgt. Chananyah Stuart, inspects Flight 552′s guidon bearer, Airman Calvin Kim, before the graduation ceremony at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen)“Tech. Sgt. Stuart represents the very best aspects of our United States Air Force and the exceptional basic military training instructors assigned to the 37th Training Wing,” said. Col. Trent H. Edwards, the 37th TRW commander. “I am proud, not only of his individual leadership accomplishment, but the accomplishments of the members of Flight 552 for the team effort it took to be recognized as the honor flight.”In week seven, Stuart has his trainees complete their first Joint Hometown News Program release, and they take their written tests and complete their final evaluations in drill and physical fitness. In their final week, they see downtown San Antonio for the first time in two months, since they left the airport for the 30-minute bus ride to BMT. Once they receive their Airman’s coins at the Airman Coin and Retreat Ceremony, they can finally be called Airmen, and their big week concludes with their parade and graduation ceremony. Even though the flight took top honors, both at BEAST and in being named honor flight, Stuart’s impact was perhaps best illustrated in how the Flight 552 trainees adopted certain aspects of their instructor’s personality and teachings. Once, another MTI said he heard Stuart’s distinctive voice leading the flight in drill in the squadron atrium, or so he thought. The voice actually belonged to Parker, the flight’s dorm chief. As the trainees took on many of Stuart’s words, they also developed a deep respect, as their instructor knew they would from that first night’s march across the parade field.
“In the beginning, Tech. Sgt. Stuart was the only MTI I’d ever known, so I figured they were all like him,” Stackhouse said.. “Then, as the weeks progressed, I realized that he is actually, if not the best, one of the best MTIs out there, just from hearing other MTIs and flights talking about him and holding him in such high regard. It just makes me feel blessed to have been trained by him.”
- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2014/11/making-airmen/#sthash.5z4ajVVP.dpuf

U.S. Maintains Air Superiority For Six Decades

A few months after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower surveyed the Normandy beaches with his son. "You'd never get away with this if you didn't have air supremacy," then 2nd Lt. John Eisenhower told his father. "Without air supremacy," the elder Eisenhower replied, "I wouldn't be here." The United States won air superiority in Europe by 1944 and the Pacific by the fall, won it in Korea in 1950 and hasn't lost control of the skies since. No American service members on the ground have died from enemy air attacks since three were killed during the Korean War more than 60 years ago. Control of the air gives a military power the opportunity to exploit height, reach and speed, enabling informed decision-making, the ability to strike freely at a distance, and the ability to maneuver unconstrained by the limits of terrain or ocean, said Dr. Richard P. Hallion, former Air Force Historian and senior advisor for air and space issues with the Directorate for Security, Counterintelligence and Special Programs Oversight. "I go back to David versus Goliath," said Hallion, author of "Storm Over Iraq: Airpower in the Gulf War" and "Strike from the Sky: The History of Battlefield Attack." "There wasn't a manhood issue here demanding he engage in the close fight, where he could have lost. Instead, David hit him with an aerospace weapon - a rock at a distance. In the airpower era, that aerospace weapon is the airplane and missile of today." When the North Koreans invaded the South in June 1950, they did so with overwhelming military force, and initially, without encountering immediate air attacks, Hallion said. Retired Marine Corps Col. Warren Wiedhahn experienced combat in Korea as a private first class, both with and without close air support. During the initial days of the Korean War, "there was no close air support, the North Korean juggernaut moved very rapidly with their tanks, artillery and infantry. They annihilated everything in front of them until there was nothing left in Korea but the Pusan perimeter," Wiedhahn said. But by then, robust air power forces - Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps - assisted by British, Australian and South Korean airmen as well - were taking a heavy toll on North Korean attackers, Hallion said. "During that period of time, the close air support was building up," Wiedhahn said. "The ships were coming in. The Air Force was flying. Now, all of a sudden, we began to see aircraft." After participating in the Inchon Landing and helping to liberate Seoul, Wiedhahn also fought in the battle of the Chosin Reservoir a few months later. United Nations forces chased the North Korean army to the southern tip of South Korea until China sent more than 100,000 troops that surrounded about 30,000 U.N. troops. "When we were up in the Chosin Reservoir, and the Chinese decided to attack, we began to see air - mostly Navy and Marine Corps (Vought F4U) Corsairs off of the carriers. That's how I really began to appreciate close air support. It (Control of the air) is absolutely, positively vital. After a 17-day battle in sub-zero temperatures, the Marines managed to withdraw to the coast, where they were evacuated in December." "Indeed, air power saved the Marines from annihilation as they made their way from the reservoir down to the coast," Hallion said. Five years after Wiedhahn retired as a colonel in 1982, he talked with four of the Chinese he fought against in the Chosin Reservoir during a visit to Beijing as part of his Virginia-based Military Historical Tours organization. About 40 years later, the sights and sounds of American aircraft were still engrained in their memories. "One of the greatest things we feared was your airpower," the Chinese told Wiedhahn. They said, they always moved at night, and never moved when the weather was clear because of their fear of our planes. Air superiority and supremacy are two of the five conditions in the air warfare spectrum, along with air paralysis, air inferiority and air parity. There is actually a huge difference between air superiority and supremacy that can be especially costly in war, Hallion said. "Air superiority is the absolute minimal condition we should ever be prepared to fight with," he said. "Air superiority means that the enemy is still able to undertake air action against you, but you are able to confound and defeat it. What we should really seek is what we had in the latter stages of World War II and what we had in the (Persian) Gulf War, where we had air supremacy, indeed, we had air dominance. That's where you so thoroughly dominate your opponent that they are instantly confronted with air attack, and they are unable to do anything about it. "We had air supremacy, clearly, in the first Gulf War because in that war, the Iraqi air force was simply unable to intervene either against our coalition air forces or against coalition surface forces. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, by the second or third week, the Iraqi air force was fleeing the country, and the air action there was primarily intercepting aircraft trying to flee to Iran. That's what happens when you have air supremacy, and in the best of all circumstances, air dominance. You can then devote 100 percent of your air effort to ensure that the people on the ground get the support they need to prosecute the ground war." Gen. Charles A. Horner, who commanded all U.S. and allied air assets during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, credited the airpower dominance to the intelligence, preparation and training before the invasion. "When did we get air superiority? We had it before the war began because we had the means to get it - the equipment, intelligence, training, and the courage of the aircrews," Horner said. "But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a macho, no-sweat operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most-critical aspect of the entire war." Because the Air Force has had almost an unprecedented control of the skies for decades, it might be easy to forget how costly it was to achieve air superiority, especially during World War II. In the European and Mediterranean theaters alone, the U.S. lost 4,325 fighters and bombers before D-Day, with 17,000 killed and 21,000 wounded or POW in the fight for air superiority and didn't achieve theater-wide supremacy until the final days of the war. More Airmen were killed in aerial missions over Europe "than all the Marines who unfortunately died in the entire span of World War II," said retired Gen. David Deptula, who was the Air Force's senior intelligence community official when he was the Headquarters Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Deptula was also the main attack planner during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and a joint task commander for Operation Northern Watch in 1998-99. "If you take a look at how many aircraft we lost in the Vietnam War - 2,781 Air Force and Navy combined, that was against a fifth-rate power with only 206 fighter aircraft. Why did that happen? Because, we were late in achieving air superiority. "It took us some 30 years to apply the air superiority lesson, but we did it in the form of developing the F-15 (Eagle). But those F-15s first flew in 1972, and now some of them are more than 30 years old. In 1979, I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base, Japan. In 2008, my son was flying the exact same tail numbers I did, but it was 29 years later, and that was five years ago. Today, we have a geriatric combat Air Force, and we badly need to recapitalize it in order to maintain the advantage of air supremacy in the future." Without control of the air, troops on the ground face many hardships and hazards, as the late Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, vice chief of staff during the Vietnam War, wrote in an article for Air University Press. For six decades, American troops haven't had to experience "what it's like to lose mobility except at night; to be cut off from supplies and reinforcements; to be constantly under the watchful eye of enemy reconnaissance aircraft; to be always vulnerable to strafing and bombing attacks; to see one's fighters and bombers burn on their handstands; and to be outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered in the air," Holloway wrote in his article, "Air Superiority in Tactical Air Warfare." However, there are some who aren't convinced the Air Force's decades-long dominance of the air is a certainty, especially with recent cuts in weapons systems such as the F-22 Raptor, which Deptula calls "the most capable aircraft ever built specifically to achieve air superiority," and F-35 Lightning II. In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for capping the original 722 Raptors to 187. Three years later, across-the-board defense spending cuts have put the F-35 at risk. "There are newer threats out there, quite frankly, that could defeat the aircraft that we currently have," Deptula said. "That's why the Air Force works so hard to recapitalize those aircraft by building F-22s and F-35s that can operate, using modern technology, to achieve air dominance by networking capabilities with sensors that we never had in the past. "Our challenge in the future is we're not going to have time to do what we did in World War II - bring America's industrial might to bear over the time necessary to create the kinds of aircraft to maintain our superiority advantage. It falls on Airmen of today, to articulate the air superiority lessons of the past and to make the Airman's voice in the defense of our nation heard. Today's Airmen need to be unabashedly clear about the lessons of history in order to maintain our capabilities in the future." As vital as Eisenhower perceived air superiority to success on D-Day, some airpower experts wonder if the day will come when the U.S. won't have the control of the skies needed for a crucial confrontation with another military power. "I think the greatest danger we face as a nation today is to assume that air and space power is a God-given right to the United States of America, and we will always enjoy it," Hallion said. "We see that sometimes, unfortunately, in our sister services. They have labored so long with perfect freedom of maneuver because of the American airpower shield that we've put over their heads that I think many individuals fail to realize that it is perishable. Air dominance is like freedom itself - you have to constantly nurture it, care for it and invest in it to ensure that you will still have it."

Desert Storm 20 Years Later: Lessons from Vietnam Guided Commanders as They Planned Gulf War Strategy

Two decades ago, the United States fought a new kind of war, but commanders used lessons from an old one as inspiration. Mistakes from the Vietnam War guided commanders as they planned Operation Desert Storm, which began 20 years ago in January.
Unlike several competing command authorities like there were in Vietnam, Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of U.S. forces during Desert Storm, assigned air operations to one commander. As the joint force air component commander, retired Gen. Charles A. Horner was the architect of the air campaign that launched the Persian Gulf War.
 “If you aren’t part of the air campaign under Horner, you don’t fly,” General Schwarzkopf said to one of his commanders, according to the Gulf War Airpower Survey.
“I think the lessons that really came out in Desert Storm were the ones we’d been honing and altering in operations from the previous wars,” General Horner said. “In World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we did things wrong that we learned from, so in Desert Storm, we did a lot of things right.
“We learned bitter, bitter lessons in Vietnam that really paid off in Desert Storm. Our shared experiences in Vietnam [were] one of the reasons Schwarzkopf was so willing to let airpower rule the weight of that war. He wanted to get the job done with the least cost in human life on both sides.”
The U.S. military had 148 battle deaths and 145 non-combat deaths during Desert Storm, according to the 1991 Defense Almanac. Fourteen of 20 Airmen killed during the war were battle-related. The air war was crucial to the ground war that sealed the Iraqi army’s fate on Feb. 23 and ended 100 hours later with a ceasefire on Feb. 28. Coalition aircraft flew more than 65,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 bombs. The aerial bombardment “placed Iraq in a position of a tethered goat,” General Horner said after the war.
“Our loss rate overall in the Gulf War was lower than normal training,” he said. “We lost fewer airplanes in the Gulf War than we would’ve lost flying that number of sorties. It was amazing. One of the problems we had was we made something very difficult look very easy, so people get misconceptions about what it takes to pull something like that off.”
A United Nations-authorized coalition force, led by the United States and United Kingdom, began the first phase of Desert Storm on Jan. 16, 1991 after Iraq failed to meet a UN Security Council’s deadline to leave Kuwait by Jan. 15. Desert Shield began five days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990 when President George H.W. Bush ordered air and ground forces to Saudi Arabia. It became the largest American deployment since Vietnam. More than 30 other nations joined the coalition, and 18 other countries contributed with financial and humanitarian aid. The coalition built up its force in the Arabian Peninsula during the next six months.
The day General Horner received the call that eventually launched Desert Shield on Aug. 7, 1990, he and his F-16 Falcon were engaged in an air-to-air training mission near the North Carolina coast with two F-15 Eagles from Langley Air Force Base, Va.
General Horner, then commander of 9th Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., had expected to hear from General Schwarzkopf since Saddam Hussein moved 120,000 Iraqi troops into Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia several days earlier on Aug. 2. But once the call from the Federal Aviation Administration came for him to return to Shaw, he knew instantly what it meant. He was on the way to brief President Bush on possible military responses with General Schwarzkopf.
“We’d been following the invasion since it happened,” General Horner said. “In fact, I had the 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Shaw and the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley on alert for about a month to the point it was affecting their peacetime operations. My boss, Gen. Bob Russ, called me and said, ‘Chuck, you probably need to take them off alert. You’re affecting operations.’ I said I can’t. Suddenly, the invasion occurred, just like everybody was predicting.”
Even though the death toll was comparatively low in Desert Storm, it hit one of the largest Air Force Reserve organizations particularly hard months before hostilities began. On Aug. 28, nine Airmen in the 433rd Military Airlift Wing at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio died in a C-5 Galaxy crash at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Wing members wore black bands over their unit shoulder patches when their 68th Military Airlift Squadron was recalled to active duty the next day.
Long before the Gulf crisis began, the American military trained for an eventual showdown with Iraq, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. A month earlier, a U.S. Central Command war game had a scenario of a “Country Orange” attacking Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the north. When General Schwarzkopf accepted command of U.S. CENTCOM in November 1989, he told his military leaders since a war with Russia wasn’t likely, “we have to find a new enemy or go out of business,” General Horner said.
“He said he was concerned about Iraq because they came out of the Iran-Iraq War with a huge military, dead-broke and owing a lot of money,” General Horner said. “So he told us to think about that. So I had been thinking about it and in March, I’d gone to brief him about things like using the MM-104 Patriot for ballistic missile defense.
“I knew if we’d ever gotten into a ground war against Iraq, our Army would never know what they’d come up against until they came up against it. So what I wanted to do was to make sure they’d get all the air support they needed when they needed it and where they needed it, but they didn’t tie down the Air Force in anticipation. Those sorties could be out killing the enemy instead of sitting on the ground waiting on the Army to call. Schwarzkopf bought the idea immediately because he was very intelligent and easy to work with.”
When Desert Storm began, General Horner and his staff planned only the first two-and-a-half days of the war. He sent then Maj. Gen. Buster Glosson, his key air war planner, to each base so he could consider the input of Airmen fighting the war.
“We listened to what the captains and sergeants have to say because they’re the ones who have to exercise the war, and they know very well what’s going on,” General Horner said. “I always reserved the right to override them, but nonetheless I wanted to hear what they had to say.”
The air war caught Iraq by surprise, especially Hussein who told Dan Rather in a CBS interview days before the war: “The United States depends on the Air Force. The Air Force has never decided a war.” Then came the opening night of the war Hussein had called “the mother of all battles” when Lt. Gen. Larry L. “Puba” Henry launched unmanned target drones on all Iraqi sand sites in Baghdad and Bazra.
“The next day, they reported shooting down 49 enemy aircraft, and that was exactly the number of target drones we sent up,” General Horner said. “I was amazed – either it was blind luck or they were extremely good at collecting data. The same time they were shooting at these target drones, we had these anti-radiation missiles raining down on both Bazra and Baghdad. As a result, they rarely turned on their guidance radars. The reason was they knew if they turned on that guidance radar, they were going to get a missile.
“On the second night, the Iraqi air force was very reluctant to fly, other than trying to escape. So we went after their minds, as well as their physical capabilities, and it really paid off.”
The coalition organized for both Desert Shield and Desert Storm gave U.S. military services an opportunity to work closely with forces from other nations, as they would do a decade later during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. An Air Combat Command exercise called Blue Flag in the early 1980s was intended to train servicemembers who would deploy to Europe or Korea to augment the air operations center. General Horner insisted that his 9th Air Force units work closely with Army, Marine Corps and Navy contingents, “who we would actually be going to war with,” he said.
In addition to learning from Vietnam battle strategy, General Horner also sought help from the history of the Middle East. He took advantage of learning from history, and it served him well during Desert Storm.
 “The thing I used to worry about the most was what was I not doing that I should be doing,” General Horner said. “What mistakes am I making that may cost somebody’s life? That bedeviled me every minute of every day, so I did a lot of thinking, and I listened to a lot of people. I got some great help from Air Force and aviation historian Dr. Dick Hallion, and he used to send me boxes of books about wars in the Middle East. I read those books, and believe me, they helped my feeling of the region and my sense of what to do. You never know where you’re going to get information that’s going to pay off.
“That’s why I think every general ought to be a historian.”

Air Force Couple Experiences Dream Wedding

SAN FRANCISCO (AFNS) -- Cancer seemed as far away as a San Francisco seagull could fly as an Air Force captain danced his first dance with his new bride. Capt. Mike and Vanessa Hawkins married in a ceremony on the San Francisco waterfront May 14, and for a few weeks, they could push aside her stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma illness for a wedding won in the San Francisco Dream Wedding Giveaway.

The online contest provided the couple, she an Air Force Academy graduate and he a University of Virginia ROTC graduate, with a $100,000 wedding package that included the ceremony at a luxury waterfront hotel, custom-designed rings, a honeymoon in nearby Napa, Calif., and allowed the bride to temporarily set aside the sweatpants and T-shirts she wears for chemotherapy and radiation treatments for a white, strapless Lee Ann Belter gown. The only visible sign of the bride's stage IV Hodgkin's, which is usually widespread in the lymph nodes and other parts of the body such as lungs, liver or bone, was a bandage on her forearm.

"It was definitely like a dream," Mrs. Hawkins said just before the ceremony on the roof of Hotel Vitale, across from the Port of San Francisco. "Even what you can dream cannot be anything like this. I really don't know if I could've planned a wedding right now. This is better than I ever dreamed I could feel and I feel prettier than I ever dreamed I could look."

The couple met exactly three years earlier at Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.  Captain Hawkins was a contracting officer; his future bride worked in personnel after she was given the option of cross-training into services or separating from the Air Force. She chose to separate.  They became engaged in July 2008 and received the news of her diagnosis the day before Captain Hawkins deployed to Southwest Asia.

They survived the separation while she endured her treatments with the help of the Columbus AFB community and family. Through SKYPE video chats, Captain Hawkins shaved his head when his fiancé lost her hair because of her chemotherapy treatments. While he was deployed, she was in Wisconsin with her family, so both were apart from their friends in the squadron at Columbus.

"But they never forgot about me," she said.

Mrs. Hawkin's nurse submitted the couple in the online San Francisco Dream Wedding Giveaway, and they wrote an essay and produced a video that told the story of their relationship and her battle with Hodgkin's. The Air Force community quickly went to work, along with Mrs. Hawkin's father, Van Teskey, in Wisconsin. Captain Hawkins and his fiance were one of 350 couples in an online contest decided by website voting.

"I was getting calls from people on bases throughout the country who had heard about us," said Captain Hawkins, now a contracting officer in Chantilly, Va. "People Air Force-wide had heard about us through the global network. Even people who didn't know us were voting for us and sending it to old squadrons and church groups. They were telling people, 'This is an Air Force captain and they deserve this.'"

He returned home in November and was with his fiancé on Valentine's Day when a team of photographers and videographers appeared at his mother's home in Stafford, Va., to tell them they were named "the most inspirational couple" in the first San Francisco Dream Wedding Giveaway. Many of their Air Force friends booked their airline tickets and hotel reservations before the couple had theirs.

Liz Guthrie, a San Jose wedding consultant with the contest, who had created a non-profit organization designed to plan smaller weddings for couples like the Hawkins, said many people were inspired by the couple's story.

"We were looking for someone who was facing illness, loss or hardship to give a wedding to and the public determined the winner," she said. "Mike and Vanessa's story touched a lot of people and they won by a landslide. I think this is a great way for them to have a celebration with their family and friends and not have to think about their illness."

After their honeymoon in Napa, the couple plans to live in their Fairfax, Va., townhouse and Mrs. Hawkins will resume her treatments. But she's already thinking past the cancer, to a future that includes nursing school and a family. Captain Hawkins and his new wife are grateful to the contest sponsors and to both their families and the Air Force community for helping them have their dream wedding day on the San Francisco Bay.

"His commanders have been totally supportive and all of the spouses of people in his squadron have been incredible," Mrs. Hawkins said. "He's only been in Virginia for two weeks and everyone has already reached out to me. Then, there are all of my friends from the Academy and some of them were here for this. That's a relationship you can't build anywhere else and it's so awesome to be able to share this with them.

"The Air Force network is incredible," she said.