Posted on 07/03/2002 4:32:33 AM PDT by Snow Bunny
If you aspire to become a prestigious and prosperous attorney, you naturally attend Yale or Harvard law school. Want a successful career in medicine? Consider Johns Hopkins. A future in motion pictures? Try New York University’s film school, where Hollywood’s top directors go.
And if you want to learn how to build the best bombs, which boom the loudest, you go to AFCOMAC — the Air Force’s Ammo University. It’s the MIT of munitions; the Berkeley of bombs. AFCOMAC, short for the Air Force Combat Ammunition Center at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., just north of Sacramento, is an institution of higher learning where you literally get more bang for your buck. The school offers two courses — the three-week combat ammunition planning and production course, and the two-day senior officer orientation course.
To gain admission to this college of “kaboom,” you need not hold honors as a high school valedictorian, score 1600 on your SATs, or hold a Phi Beta Kappa key, but don’t expect to find any dunces in the classroom. Though, you might run across a few “duds.” To get accepted, you need membership in the society of “ammo” troops, not to be confused with weapons loaders, known as “load toads” in ammo circles, or with nuclear weapons technicians, maligned as “mushroom mechanics.” Of course, these other two vocations have their pet name for ammo — BB stackers.
Ammo airmen — technically called munitions systems specialists and classified under the specialty code 2W0X0 — belong to a relatively small career field, only 6,200 or so strong. Their mission: handling, maintaining, building, delivering and accounting for conventional munitions used on aircraft.
“We produce bombs to make smoking holes, because let’s face it, an Air Force combat jet without bombs is just an unscheduled airliner,” said Maj. Lee “Rhino” Levy, the center’s commandant and 9th Munitions Squadron commander.
Bombs don’t come straight from the factory, ready to drop on the enemy. On the contrary, munitions mechanics must install fuses, attach fins, install mounts for different aircraft configurations and laser guidance systems for “smart bombs.”
The Ammo University’s official motto is “To keep the peace, prepare for war!” which may look professional on squadron stationery but doesn’t sound so cool on T-shirts or bumper stickers. Ammo troops prefer the catchier, “IYAAYAS,” which means “If you ain’t ammo, you ain’t spit” (more or less).
Phi Blasta Kappa
The center began life in late 1984 after Lt. Gen. Leo Marquez assembled a Tiger Team to investigate ways to improve munitions production capabilities with the loss of experience after the Vietnam War. The team discovered that, among other problems, the munitions career field suffered from a lack of realism in its training. They found that many ammo troops never received hands-on instruction on assembling certain types of bombs, and in some cases, had never seen the ordnance they’d construct during contingencies and wartime. Hence, the center was born. The first students filed into the classroom in March 1986 at the Sierra Army Depot in Herlong, Calif. Then in summer 1993, the school moved to Beale to cut costs.
In the last three years, the center has become a real boomtown, erecting a new $6.3 million schoolhouse with five seminar rooms and four bays used for demonstrations and performance training. Adjacent to the facility, students bunk down in two new dormitories, while across base inside five munitions storage igloos, the center stockpiles $9.2 million worth of bombs and bullets. By using their own people to disassemble, repack and restore the munitions, the 9th saves more than $3 million annually.
The school accepts 70 students for each planning and production course with the class’s composition and rank structure mirroring a deployable unit — four company grade officers, one chief master sergeant, 10 senior noncommissioned officers and on down the line.
The shrapnel scholars spend the first two weeks of the basic course in the classroom, studying conventional munitions plan development and large-scale conventional ammunition production using mass munitions assembly techniques. The center’s commandant compares the munitions plan to a football coach’s playbook.
“It’s like the first 20 plays in a football game. It gets you through the first quarter,” said Levy, the school’s dean of detonations. “If you don’t have your playbook ready by the time the whistle blows, you’re in trouble. And then when the opposition starts reading you well, you might have to throw the playbook away and adjust.”
The course is mandatory for airmen to advance to their 7-skill level, and upon graduation, students earn five college credits. For the final exam, students participate in a week-long field exercise dubbed “Iron Flag,” giving new meaning to the term “bombing an exam.”
Iron Flag participants “deploy” to a bare-base environment, where they must execute their munitions plan then initiate and sustain combat munitions production. Iron Flag simulates the fog and friction of war, preparing Ammo troops for real-world contingencies like Operation Allied Force in the former Yugoslavia.
“The advantage of the AFCOMAC experience is that if you screw up in this training environment, you learn from your mistakes and the mission doesn’t suffer, plus you don’t die,” Levy said.
Saluting the frag
The class’s goal is to “make the frag,” short for fragmentary order, (translation: build the required munitions for each sortie). It’s no easy chore. Only 14 of the school’s 97 classes have pulled it off. “If you make the frag at AFCOMAC, it buys you bragging rights for the rest of your career,” Levy said.
The ammo warriors spend about four days during Iron Flag jamming out “iron” for fighters like the F-16 and F-15E, then another day on bombers, like the B-52 and B-1, and as well as cross-servicing unique aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk and A-10 Thunderbolt II.
Cranking out this many bombs is grueling, physical grunt work, and when the mission’s complete, these airmen wearily trudge home exhausted with calluses on their calluses, and arms and legs aching, looking like they’ve just spent a hard day toiling in a coal mine.
“Iron Flag’s tough and very demanding, especially for the young guys because they’re doing the bulk of the heavy work,” said Master Sgt. Chuck Keisel, a student assigned to Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. “Actually, it’s a lot more punishing than I expected. I was over in the sandbox during Desert Storm, and the ops tempo at the schoolhouse is much higher here than it was in wartime.
“When we have to deploy, you can’t beat this training. It teaches you to integrate with others and get the job done,” Keisel said.
They’re tasked by the center’s cadre to build almost 1,500 munitions, a mix of GBUs (guided bomb units) or “smart bombs,” like the computer-controlled GBU-27 used on the F-117; cluster bomb units; and general purpose bombs, like the 2,000-pound Mk-84.
This fall the school will begin instruction in assembling the JDAM, the joint direct attack munition, which is the newest class of smart bombs employing a global positioning system to direct the bomb to the target without regard to cloud cover or poor visibility.
And, oh, by the way, they’re making real, live bombs. There’s no simulation.
Said Levy: “Nothing gets your attention like live munitions. It gives our students a sense of realism and focus, and provides one-of-a-kind training.”
To the school’s credit, it’s never suffered an explosives accident in its history, and recently, it won the 1998 Air Force explosive safety award for direct-mission support. You can attribute that success to the squadron’s safety philosophy.
“Safety is everything — period,” Levy said. ‘There’s nothing during peacetime worth getting killed over. The No. 1 goal of our squadron is everybody gets out of here alive.”
During wartime, however, our enemies aren’t so lucky. Ammo troops say, “We live so others may die.” Now wouldn’t that look good on a T-shirt?
Takes me back. There's nothing like basic to teach a person just what it takes to make a person happy. A cold coke and a candy bar and 10 mins. away from ti's yelling at you, that'll do it.
Not that things like this get to us square-jawed, steely-eyed, John Wayne-on a bad day types.
I now understand that (vicariously) through my son! :o)
Excuse me, as I go grab a Diet Dr. Pepper........
Without ORDNANCE Naval Aviation is just another unscheduled airlines!!! This comes to you from an active duty Ordnanceman! We deliver death and destruction.
'Til later.
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