re: #99 Charles Johnson

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It’ll take a LOT of money to regenerate a nuclear alert capability again. When I was at K. I. Sawyer AFB, we had six alert lines of two planes, a paired bomber and a tanker. So, 60 pilots, naviguessers, bombardiers, gunners, and ECM crews. We were all housed in the Alert Shack. It hasn’t been used in 26 years and will have to repaired and upgraded. Not living with us, but a daily presence, were cooks, security crews, daily briefers, weapons handlers, drivers, comm teams and Ops and Field Maintenance crew.

We would have to pull all of the mothballed B-52 H’s out of Davis-Monthan and get them back to Emergency War Order status, including remounting the 20 mm Gatling gun in the tail, returning and upgrading the ECM suite, training new Gunners and ECM operators, upgrade comms and nav suites, etc.

It’ll take months and a shitpot of money.

The reason that the Buffs were taken off of alert status in the first place was that we figured we could get by on the other two legs of the triad and use the B-2s as the nuclear bomber force, and use the Buff as a conventional platform, along with the B-1B.