[af_vet_rr]

In the '70's we were underfunded, understaffed and our equipment was falling apart. The Carter military.

That's the understatement of the century! I loved seeing lots of aircraft idle because they needed one thing or another.

But we, perhaps foolishly, thought if we were called upon to fight the Sov's in Germany (the primary mission my unit trained for) we could get the job done.

It's not that at all - I'm sure you guys could have put up a helluva fight. It's just that the infrastructure wasn't in place to support you guys for very long which would probably lead to things going nuclear fairly fast (and when I say that, I mean NATO launching nukes, not the Warsaw Pact).

If the Soviets/Warsaw Pact were able to get through the Fulda Gap and get things moving along, we just did not have the people and equipment to buy us the time until troops could start pouring in from the US (and given the state of the Air Force/Navy back then, I don't know that the amount of reinforcements you guys needed could have arrived in a timely enough manner). The people with stars on their shoulders would have to make decisions of whether to give up Germany or start getting into decisions that nobody wants to make.

[colorado tanker]

We had prepositioned equipment in Europe, so the plan was for us to fly passenger jet (probably commandeered commercial) to Europe, pick up our stuff and roll. I was load plans officer, so I know you guys didn't have anywhere close to enough airlift to take our stuff overseas fast.

I was in a worldwide command post exercise (war game) where we gamed defending against a conventional attack through Fulda. We stopped them a little over halfway across W. Germany, sustaining heavy casualties. There was a Clancy novel about a conventional Warsaw Pact attack that had the same result. I always wondered if he was privy to those results. :-))