The 34th is commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Hopper, a highly professional, intense officer in his late thirties. A career bomber pilot, he has taken the challenge of rebuilding the 34th BS as a personal passion, and it shows. The challenges are many (especially in light of the B-1B's well-reported systems problems); and the 34th is fortunate to have the 28th Bombardment Wing (BW) as its host unit at Ellsworth AFB. Thanks to the leadership of Brigadier J. C. Wilson, Jr., the Bones of the 28th BW have exceeded the demanding performance standards mandated by the Congress in the Dakota Challenge Operational Readiness Inspection. As a unit making a transition to the B-1B, the 34th BS has benefited greatly from a close relationship with the highly experienced people of the 28th BW.
When they received their allotment of six PAA aircraft (the squadron carries a total of eleven B-1Bs on its balance sheet), they faced some severe challenges: The loss of the BUFFs in the Fall of 1993 eliminated the wing's long-range standoff weapons capability (the AGM-142 Have Nap, etc.). And the B-1B has always had a reputation as a 'hangar queen' (an aircraft that spends most of its time indoors, waiting for repairs, spare parts, technical manual revisions, or software bug fixes). Nevertheless, they saw some opportunities in the Bone that the B-52 could not offer. These included:
• Vastly superior performance, especially in speed, maneuverability, and bomb capacity.
• Superior low-level penetration capability.
• Greatly reduced radar and IR signature (about 1/100th as much as the B-52).
• Excellent avionics, including a Synthetic Aperture Radar, sensitive RWR, and a powerful radar jamming system.
• The best communications suite in the 366th Wing, including a UHF satellite communications terminal for in-flight target data reception.
• A precision weapons upgrade plan (CBU-87/89/97 with wind correction kits, GBU-29/30 JDAMS, AGM-145 JSOW, GPS receiver, etc.), which is part of ACC's 'Bomber Roadmap.'
With these capabilities, it is easy to see why Lieutenant Colonel Hopper and his squadron like to call their B-1Bs 'Mo Bones' or 'Mean Bones.' In the short run, unfortunately, not all these capabilities will be available. In particular, JDAM and JSOW will slip some years in the future, despite the best efforts of the USAF Materiel Command and ACC. Nevertheless, Tim Hopper has his own ideas about how the wing might use the B-1B in combat. Some of them include:
• Command and Control—The wing might use the B-1B as a CI platform, using the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) capabilities of the Offensive Avionics Suite and the Bone's excellent communications capabilities much like a mini-JSTARS platform.
• Standoff/Escort Jamming—With the planned retirement of the EF- 111A Raven force scheduled for FY-1997, the B-1B might function as a jamming platform for the 366th Wing, using the Bone's ALQ- 161 defensive countermeasures suite. With electronic warfare birds in short supply, the B-1B's RWR system might be able to supply radar targeting data to HARM-carrying F-16s from the 389th FS, if appropriate data links like JTIDS or an Improved Data Modem can be installed.
• Composite Wing Strike—With all the attention precision-guided weapons receive these days, it is sometimes forgotten that many potential targets for a unit like the 366th are of the 'area' type, like troop concentrations, rail yards, truck parks, factories, etc. Area targets require large numbers of relatively small weapons to do significant damage, and the Bone is perfect for the job. With the B-1B capable of carrying up to eighty-four Mk 82 500lb./227.3 kg. bombs or several dozen CBU-87/89/97 cluster bombs, the rest of the wing could use their SEAD and PGM capabilities to neutralize SAMs and AAA, after which the Bones could come in and lay waste to a target area.
Lieutenant Colonel Hopper and the 34th achieved a major step with the Global Power/Global Reach mission mentioned earlier. Now, they are looking forward to the planned system upgrades that will make them even more dangerous. When the massive construction project at Mountain Home AFB is completed in a few years, they can join the rest of the wing in Idaho.
Bridging the gulf between the fighter culture and the bomber culture can be a struggle for both communities. General McCloud told us a story about the first composite strike exercise that the 366th ran with the Bones. Several B-1B crews briefed with a strike force from the four other squadrons and headed down to the Nellis AFB ranges to run the mission. Afterwards, when the mission was debriefed, the pilot from one of the bomber crews confessed, 'We did not understand a word you guys said on the radio.' They have come a long way from that inauspicious beginning. When you consider what was achieved after just six months of operations, you can understand what Tim Hopper has accomplished.
22nd Air Refueling Squadron
The 22nd Air Refueling Squadron (ARS) is the only flying unit in the 366th Wing that does not shoot or drop things that explode. Yet, it is the key to the 366th's ability to instantly deploy and generate combat missions. Dave McCloud and the rest of the wing treasure the 22nd ARS more than diamonds… or even new -229 engines for all the fighters. Only two combat wings within ACC have their own tanker assets, and there is
The 22nd ARS was one of the four original flying squadrons at Mountain Home AFB when the wing was reorganized back in 1992. Its first commander is Lieutenant Colonel John F. Gaughan II, whose boyish good looks conceal a razor-sharp mind. Originally formed in 1939 as a heavy bomber unit, the 22nd flew the B-17, B-25, and A-26 during World War II in the Pacific and China before being disestablished in 1945. Reborn in 1952 as an airborne tanker squadron flying KC-97s, it has served with SAC and ACC ever since. Along the way, the 22nd also flew the EC-135 before it was disestablished at the end of the Cold War in 1989. Like the rest of the 366th squadrons, it was reformed in 1992.
It was originally equipped with noisy, smoky, fuel-guzzling 1950s-era turbojets, but the 22nd's aircraft have now been refitted with modern CFM- 56 turbofans to improve fuel economy and offload capacity. They are surprisingly young, at only about thirteen thousand hours of flight time average per airframe. Since the tankers have so little flight time, they avoided many of the stresses of repeated takeoff, pressurization, and landing cycles that eventually wear out an airframe. The USAF is currently planning to fly the KC- 135s until roughly the year 2020, a career of almost sixty years!
As for the 22nd ARS itself, because there is a lot of room in the KC-135, even when it is full of fuel, there is a lot more to their mission than just the complex aerial dance that allows fuel to pass to other aircraft. Still, the 22nd ARS is quite skilled at its primary job. For example, in fourteen days of operations at Green Flag 94-3 with just four aircraft, the 22nd flew ninety-seven sorties, refueling several hundred tactical sorties. Meanwhile, the big, open main compartment in the fuselage of the tanker can hold a lot of stuff. This includes:
• Personnel Transport—Each KC-135 can transport up to eighty passengers with their personal gear. This is enough to establish a small air-base cadre at their destination, as well as helping to relieve the burden on the limited resources of the Air Mobility Command (AMC).
• Cargo Transport—While they are currently limited to cargo which can be carried onboard by human muscle power, the aircraft of the 22nd ARS can help out in the transport mission by taking on bulk cargo and lashing it carefully to the existing plywood floors.
• Mission Planning/C3I—During the hours the wing staff is in the air deploying to a crisis, these very people need to be getting ready to launch the first air strikes. In particular, the
