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"DEPICTS CONSTANT READINESS OF STRATEGIC
AIR COMMAND'S
PEOPLE, BOMBERS AND MISSILES TO DEFEND THE
COUNTRY. PORTRAYS AROUND-THE-CLOCK OPERATIONS WHILE AIR AND GROUND CREWS, MISSILEMEN AND MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL
TELL HOW THEY CARRY OUT THEIR IMPORTANT MISSIONS.
COVERS COMMAND AND
CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, AIR REFUELING, RECONNAISSANCE, AND NUCLEAR
SAFETY ACTIVITIES. STRESSES PROFESSIONALISM AND RELIABILITY OF
SAC'S PERSONNEL."
US Air Force film SFP-1448
Reupload of a previously uploaded film, in one piece instead of multiple parts, and with improved video & sound.
Public domain film from the
US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command
The
Strategic Air Command (SAC) was both a
Major Command (
MAJCOM) of the
United States Air Force and a "specified command" of the
United States Department of Defense. SAC was the operational establishment in charge of
America's land-based strategic bomber aircraft and land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (
ICBM) strategic nuclear arsenal from 1946 to
1992...
During the interwar period between
World War I and
World War II , a group of
U.S. Army Air
Corps officers colloquially referred to as the
Bomber Mafia, convinced of the potential of strategic bombing, paved the way both for the massive strategic air campaigns in
Europe and the
Pacific in World War II and the later creation of SAC. One of SAC's
United States Army Air Forces (
USAAF) predecessors, the "
Continental Air Forces" (
CAF) was established on
13 December 1944 and activated on
15 December 1944. CAF controlled the numbered air forces within the
United States (
1st Air Force,
2nd Air Force,
3rd Air Force and
4th Air Force) and their training mission.
On 21
March 1946, CAF was disestablished as part of a major reorganization of the USAAF.
Within the United States, the USAAF was divided into three separate commands:
Tactical Air Command (
TAC),
Air Defense Command (
ADC), and Strategic Air Command (SAC). Airfields formerly assigned to CAF were reassigned to one of these three major commands...
The situation began to change on
19 October 1948, when
Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay assumed leadership of the Strategic Air Command, a position he held until June
1957, the longest tenure for any
United States armed forces commander since
Winfield Scott...
During LeMay's command, SAC was able to effect great changes in
American nuclear strategy...
LeMay started shortly after his arrival at SAC, by having SAC planners draw up
Emergency War Plan 1-49, which involved striking seventy
Soviet cities with 133 atomic bombs over a thirty day period in an effort to destroy Soviet industrial capacity. But with the
Soviet Union gaining possession of atomic weapons in 1949, SAC was forced to rethink its nuclear strategy...
By the end of the
1950s, SAC had identified 20,
000 potential Soviet target sites and had officially designated 3,560 of those sites as bombing targets, with the significant percentage being counterforce targets of Soviet air defense, airfields and suspected missile sites
.
...the concept of a SAC airborne command post was developed... The aircraft selected for this duty was a deriviative of SAC's
KC-135 Stratotanker.
Named the
EC-135 Looking Glass, it realized the SAC vision of a flying command post. As a result, one of SAC's EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft was constantly airborne from
1961 until the dissoultion of the Soviet Union and the de facto end of the
Cold War in
1990...
With the end of the war in
Vietnam... older B-52B, B-52C, B-52E and B-52F aircraft were retired, along with the
B-58A, leaving SAC with an offensive force of several hundred B-52D,
B-52G,
B-52H and
FB-111A strike aircraft, augmented by 1,
054 Titan II,
Minuteman II and
Minuteman III ICBMs...
- published: 13 Nov 2015
- views: 1319