Word: sacs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...threats. There are other ways to make the most of airpower, and the U.S. is aware of all of them. A year ago, when the Russians threatened to send volunteers to exploit the Suez crisis, the U.S. sent Moscow a private hands-off warning -and sufficient SAC bombers took the air to make the warning effective. The Russians quit talking about volunteers. SAC's bombers can be moved to forward bases to make political points (and to be read on enemy radar) just as the Navy's fleets can steam ostentatiously to show the flag. As an instrument...
Dispersal: SAC's and TAC's bases are overconcentrated, present big targets to Soviet air and missile power. Item: SAC's March AFB at Riverside, Calif, has 90 6-475 and 40 KC-97 tankers, and only one usable runway to get them all into the air come an emergency. The USAF needs six more bases right now, another 100 as soon as Tommy White can get them...
Tankers: The Air Force is scandalously short of the jet tankers needed for midair refueling at high altitude and high speed. Today SAC's B-525 must come down from 50,000 ft. to 18,000 ft. and from 650 m.p.h. to a stall-warning 250 m.p.h. to hook on to SAC's prop-driven KC-97 tankers (the equivalent of Boeing's old airline Stratocruisers). Remedy: a speedup of supply of the KC-135 jet tankers now dribbling into the Air Force at the rate of about four a month...
Manpower: The Air Force is suffering an erosion of manpower. World War II pilots are aging, and a dismaying number of bright youngsters are getting out. Between 1953 and 1956 SAC lost 90,175 skilled technicians, mostly to industry, at a replacement and retraining cost of $1.7 billion; many of these experts have since returned to SAC as their companies' "tech-reps" (civilian technical representatives), and they do much the same as their old jobs at about the salary level of SAC Commanding General Power's $16,851 a year...
Airplanes. Present delivery of B-523 is at the rate of 17 a month; SAC, still using some 300 obsolescent B-365, considers this painfully slow...