List of USAF Strategic Wings Assigned To The Strategic Air Command

List Of USAF Strategic Wings Assigned To The Strategic Air Command

During the tremendous U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) expansion of the early and mid-fifties, bases become overcrowded, with some of them supporting as many as 90 B-47s and 40 KC-97s. The first B-52 wings were also extremely large - composed of 45 bombers and 15 or 20 KC-135s, all situated on one base. As the Soviet missile threat became more pronounced and warning time became less, SAC bases presented increasingly attractive targets. It was necessary to break up these large concentrations of aircraft and scatter them throughout more bases. Several KC-97 squadrons were separated from their parent B-47 wings and relocated to northern bases. The B-47 dispersal program was a long range one and would be affected primarily through the phase out of wings in the late fifties and early sixties.

With the B-52 force, which was still growing, dispersal became an active program in 1958. Basically the B-52 dispersal program called for larger B-52 wings already in existence to be broken up into three equal-sized wings of 15 aircraft each, with two of them being relocated, normally to bases of other commands. In essence, each dispersed B-52 squadron became a strategic wing. This principle would also be followed in organizing and equipping the remained of the B-52 force. Headquarters USAF established the entire force at 42 squadrons in 1958. Ideally, each B-52 wing would have an air refueling squadron of 10 or 15 aircraft.

By the end of 1958, SAC had activated 14 strategic wings, but only three had aircraft assigned. The others were in various stages of development, with some having only a headquarters and one officer and one airman authorized.”.

Read more about List Of USAF Strategic Wings Assigned To The Strategic Air Command:  Redesignation To AFCON Status

Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, strategic, wings, assigned, air and/or command:

    A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    The strategic adversary is fascism ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
    Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

    Men’s thoughts fling
    living wires overhead,
    the swallow wings there dead.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.
    Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)

    To be worst,
    The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
    Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
    The lamentable change is from the best;
    The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,
    Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!
    The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
    Owes nothing to thy blasts.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)