In February 1999, only a few weeks before the U.S. Air Force spearheaded NATO's Allied Force air campaign against Serbia, Col. C.R. Anderegg, USAF (Ret.), visited the commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe. Colonel Anderegg had known Gen. John Jumper since they had served together as jet forward air controllers in Southeast Asia nearly thirty years earlier. From the vantage point of 1999, they looked back to the day in February 1970, when they first controlled a laser-guided bomb strike. In this book Anderegg takes us from "glimmers of hope" like that one through other major improvements in the Air Force that came between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Always central in Anderegg's account of those changes are the people who made them. This is a very personal book by an officer who participated in the transformation he describes so vividly. Much of his story revolves around the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base (AFB), Nevada, where he served two tours as an instructor pilot specializing in guided munitions.

Beretter om den teknologiske, doktrinære og uddannelsesmæssige udvikling inden for de amerikanske jagerflystyrker efter Vietnamkrigen.

Originally published in 2001. From the foreword: "In February 1999, only a few weeks before the U.S. Air Force spearheaded NATO's Allied Force air campaign against Serbia, Col. C. R. Anderegg, USAF (Ret.), visited the commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe. Colonel Anderegg had known Gen. John Jumper since they had served together as jet forward air controllers in Southeast Asia nearly thirty years earlier. From the vantage point of 1999, they looked back to the day in February 1970, when they first controlled a laser-guided bomb strike. In this book Anderegg takes us from "glimmers of hope" like that one through other major improvements in the Air Force that came between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Always central in Anderegg's account of those changes are the people who made them. This is a very personal book by an officer who participated in the transformation he describes so vividly. Much of his story revolves around the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base (AFB), Nevada, where he served two tours as an instructor pilot specializing in guided munitions. But he also takes a look at other "Fighter Mafia" outposts in the Pentagon and elsewhere. Readers meet young Mafiosi like John Jumper, Larry Keith, Ron Keys, Joe Bob Phillips, Earl Henderson, Moody Suter, John Corder, Jim Brown, John Vickery, Jack Lefforge, Jack Ihle, Stump Bowen, Dave Dellwardt, Tommy Dyches, John Madden, and Dick Myers. As one might expect to find in a fighter pilot story, there is a lot of fun along the way. For a distilled example, consult the appendix on "Jeremiah Weed" (replete with instructions for drinking "afterburners"). Colonel Anderegg's book is likely to please anyone with an interest in fighter pilots and how they molded today's Air Force.

Those old enough to remember the decade after Vietnam will recall those years as exciting but difficult ones to be a fighter pilot. Struggling to come to terms with poor performance by U.S. forces in Vietnam, we seemed to have thewrong jets, unreliable weapons, and inadequate training. On top of this we faced the specter of the next war coming in Europe against the Warsaw Pact, which outnumbered us two to one. We called the Soviet and Soviet-trained pilots Ivan, and sometimes Ivan seemed ten feet tall. We should have had an edge with our force of combat veterans. However, within five years after Vietnam, the number of experienced combat fighter pilots dropped precipitously as many disgruntled aviators left the Air Force for thegreener pastures of commercial aviation. For the ones who stayed it was no consolation to know that combat experience always evaporates after every war. All they could see was men who knew how to fight laying down their arms and retiringfrom the field.The ones who stayed struggled mightily, and this is their story. I did not focus this book on the generals and legislators who worked hard to improve the fighter force. Rather, this book is about the young officers, the line pilots, and weapons systems operators (WSOs), whose innovations, devotion to duty, intelligence,flying skills, and sheer determination made indelible marks on combat capability Of course, generals made a difference, and nothing could have happened without the leadership and support of some, like the former commanders of Tactical Air Command (TAC), Generals Robert J. Dixon, William W. Momyer, and Wilbur Creech. Some of the stories I relate include them, but the thrust is toward the “blighters in the trenches.” Most worked long, usually thankless hours in anenvironment where the cynics among them stated that the reward for excellence was no punishment.History is at once educational and fickle. After reading this, a young officer, pilot or not, will have a better understanding of how the fighter force developed. Nonetheless, much of the information herein comes from interviews, and memories dim over the decades. An old joke: What is the difference between a fairy tale and a fighter pilot's war story? Answer: None, except the fairy tale starts out, “Once upon a time…” whereas the story starts out, “There I was…” That said, the information from the interviewees is the best available.All of them were in the hunt during those years, flying the jets, teaching the younger pilots, and striving for excellence. No one knows more about the era.

With the enthusiasm and credibility of a fighter pilot who actually rolled down the chute in Southeast Asia, C. R. "Lucky" Anderegg provides a "sierra hotel" account of how a small corps of dedicated fighter pilots capitalized on their combat experience and a vision of what should have occurred in Vietnam to sow the seeds of transformation that took root in the Tactical Air Force (TAF) during the decade that followed. Detailing significant advances in combat capability that sprang forth from fertile minds cultivated in the crucible of combat, Anderegg argues that the creation of the Aggressors and Red Flag marked the Fighter Mafia's crowning achievements since both served to ensure that the fruit of their many innovations fell upon Allied fighter crews in the following decades.Anderegg begins his work by examining the performance of Air Force fighter pilots in Vietnam's "school of hard knocks." Flying fighters designed for a nuclear confrontation with the Warsaw Pact, fighter crews went to Southeast Asia with inadequate training for the machines they flew and the conventional air war they faced. Highlighting numerous contributing factors, Anderegg astutely points to poor instructional methodology as the principal reason new fighter pilots arrived in-theater largely unprepared. Institutionalized by an entrenched fighter culture, training entailed upgrading pilots to learn by watching and copying the "old heads" rather than teaching them a logical method for tactical problem solving. These difficulties notwithstanding, the pragmatic fighter force of Vietnam did find better ways to get the job done by war's end.With that setting, Anderegg demonstrates how the fighter force experienced a grassroots transformation in the post-Vietnam years. As the old guard of senior veterans retired, a new corps emerged in its place comprised of less experienced yet more highly educated officers. Additionally, a changing of the guard occurred at the USAF Fighter Weapons School (FWS), long recognized as the temple of fighter-tactics training. Led by one operations officer and his cadre of instructors, the movement shed the old way in favor of a new building-block approach whereby the final objective of combat capability drove every aspect of training. The FWS codified this new methodology and disseminated it to the TAF along with several other innovations in two watershed issues of its Fighter Weapons Review, and the march was on.In the chapter "Let's Get Serious about Dive Toss," Anderegg metaphorically explains how the change in fighter culture pushed a bottom-up review of everything in the Air Force. As FWS instructors attempted to shift F-4E tactics away from manual dive-bombing towards more survivable and accurate dive toss using computed system deliveries, one FWS instructor wrote his famous "Dear Boss" letter to the commander of Tactical Air Command, highlighting root causes of a fighter-pilot exodus to the airlines. While the FWS cadre worked overtime to convert an entrenched fighter force to adopt a better tactic, one outspoken fighter pilot provided honest feedback to the top brass to do the same on a much grander scale. Of course, the rest is history, and so is the Dear Boss letter, which Anderegg thoughtfully includes as an appendix.

Beretter om den teknologiske, doktrinære og uddannelsesmæssige udvikling inden for de amerikanske jagerflystyrker efter Vietnamkrigen.