History
On 24 May 1946, the United States Army Air Forces, in response to dramatic postwar military budget cuts imposed by President Harry S. Truman, allocated inactive unit designations to the National Guard Bureau for the formation of an Air Force National Guard. These unit designations were allotted and transferred to various State National Guard bureaus to provide them unit designations to re-establish them as Air National Guard units.
The Idaho Air National Guard was formed in large part by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lanphier. Serving in the Pacific Theater Fifth Air Force during World War II, he was one of the P-38 Lightning pilots credited with shooting down Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on 18 April 1943. He stood up the 190th Fighter Squadron receiving federal recognition on 13 October 1946. Most of Idaho's early airmen were also World War II veterans. The 190th was formed with 23 officers and 44 enlisted airmen at a small building in downtown Boise. They had nothing, no buildings, no money or equipment. Receiving F-51D Mustangs, the squadron moved to Gowen Field in 1947 and has been there ever since.
18 September 1947, however, is considered the Idaho Air National Guard's official birth concurrent with the establishment of the United States Air Force as a separate branch of the United States military under the National Security Act. The initial mission of the Idaho ANG was the air defense of the state. On 1 July 1955 the 190th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron was authorized to expand to a group level, and the 124th Fighter Group (Air Defense) was allotted by the National Guard Bureau, extended federal recognition and activated.
Today, the Idaho ANG performs a worldwide ground-air support mission, along with a forward air controller training mission and support for active-duty USAF training missions.
After the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, elements of every Air National Guard unit in Idaho has been activated in support of the Global War on Terrorism. Flight crews, aircraft maintenance personnel, communications technicians, air controllers and air security personnel were engaged in Operation Noble Eagle air defense overflights of major United States cities. Also, Idaho ANG units have been deployed overseas as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq as well as other locations as directed.
Read more about this topic: Idaho Air National Guard
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)