Word: fighters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Robert Mugabe's internal terrorism does not simply consist of starving and harassing hundreds of thousands of people; it also amounts to the systematic demolition of Zimbabwe's one small hope of democracy. For a brief moment after the elections in late March, it seemed that the former freedom fighter might redeem his dictatorial legacy by acknowledging that the opposition had actually defeated him. But it turns out that the 84-year-old despot was just slow off the mark in beginning the further strangulation of his own nation. The recent order to shut down all international aid groups...
...years following its 1947 creation, bomber pilots-think of the cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay-largely ran the U.S. Air Force. That changed starting in 1982, when an unbroken chain of nine fighter-pilots-turned-four-star-generals took charge. Which is why Monday's announcement that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was tapping General Norton Schwartz, currently running the Pentagon's globe-girdling transportation network on land, air and sea, to be the beleaguered service's 19th chief of staff, meant more than your average military promotion...
...some Air Force officers were quick to grumble, though privately, over the prospect of having a "C-130 driver" in charge". But others, like former chief of staff Merrill McPeak, think that is shortsighted. "Norty is a good guy, though obviously not cut out of the mold as a fighter pilot," says McPeak, himself a one-time lead solo pilot with the Air Force's Thunderbird fighter-jet flying team. "The important thing is to have a feeling about airpower and its capabilities, not to come from any particular piece...
...United States Marine Corps actually encourages such a notion today in Iraq or Afghanistan?" Schwartz wrote in the magazine, published by the pro-service Air Force Association. Then he delivered a stinging blow, referencing perhaps the darkest day in the Air Force's recent history, when trigger-happy fighter pilots in broad daylight killed 26 U.S. troops and their allies flying on a routine mission after mistaking the choppers as Iraqi. "We as an Air Force have had our own painful experience with eagerness for contact," he said. "Some have suggested, for example, the shoot down...
...Donley to succeed Wynne). Both appointments require Senate approval, and Schwartz's nomination apparently came just in time. His biography on the Transportation Command website- which lists his first big military mission "as a crewmember in the 1975 airlift evacuation of Saigon," a sign of humility rarely witnessed among fighter pilots-had the words "Retiring effective Jan. 1, 2009" at noon Monday, but that line was gone...