George Lee Butler XIII-1: SAC Stands Down
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of General George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, Butler served as the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, the Air Force command in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons. After retiring from the Air Force in 1994, Butler came eventually to lead efforts for their elimination. Quotations in this piece will be cited to the page numbers where the material appears in Volume II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (2016).
General Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command in January 1991. He began immediately to talk with his senior leaders in SAC about the reductions that were coming with the end of the Cold War.
Back there somewhere, he knew that more than reductions in budgets would be called for. Changes. Big changes. Changes whose dimensions weren’t yet entirely clear.
In April 1991, in his first time testifying before a Congressional committee as CINCSAC, he discovered that Les Aspin, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was using “strategic” and “conventional” in a confused way. To Aspin and to many others at this stage of the game, even people in SAC, a “strategic” attack meant simply an attack that used thermonuclear weapons.
In World War II, “strategic” attacks had been those that used the “conventional” bombs of the time on war-making resources, like bridges and factories. “Strategic” attacks were to be contrasted with “tactical” attacks against forces on an active battlefield.
But the effects of nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear weapons, because they were so far-reaching, could not be limited to a strategic target like a railroad or a factory. No matter how much you might wish to limit the damage in that way. Nuclear weapons could, of course, destroy a city, as our single atomic bomb named Little Boy—tiny by contemporary “strategic” standards—had destroyed Hiroshima.
In 1988, while serving in the Pentagon’s Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy, General Butler had seen that with the imminent disappearance of the Soviet threat, a new “security environment”—as it was often called—would be emerging. One consequence was that bombers that were configured and crews that had been trained only to deliver our “strategic”—i.e. nuclear— weapons would have to be made capable of delivering “conventional” bombs on strategic targets.
SAC bombers didn’t do conventional bombing, as a rule. Or even, at this point, high altitude bombing. Since the Soviets had developed anti-aircraft missiles effective at high altitude, SAC pilots had trained to deliver their nuclear bombs by coming in at very low altitude. Their thermonuclear bombs had to be “laid down” on the ground and they were fused to detonate after a delay that would give the bombers a chance to survive the heat and blast.
During the Vietnam war, some SAC B-52s had been re-configured to deliver big loads of conventional bombs for an operation called Arc Light that started in 1965 and lasted until 1972, near the end of the war. A B-52 could carry 60,000 pounds ordnance, in this case, 500- and 750- and sometimes 1000-pound bombs. In Arc Light the bombs from a “cell” of three B-52s would be dropped from such high altitude that the first time anyone on the ground would know they were coming was when they were already there.
Arc Light was sometimes said to serve “tactical” purposes—troop support in battles and such—but that was a stretch. The damage was too general. The attacks weren’t quite “strategic” either, either in the original or, obviously, in the nuclear sense. An attack in Arc Light could cause a rectangle of utter destruction that was more than a mile long and six miles wide.
A problem here when Arc Light was extended into North Vietnam was that the North Vietnamese had gotten from the Soviets some of those anti-aircraft missiles that were effective at high altitude. Eighteen B-52s and their crews were lost to them. Thirteen more were lost to “operational” issues. Lost is, of course, lost, either way.
Arc Light seemed to have slowed down some North Vietnamese operations but it hadn’t “broken the will” of the North Vietnamese, which was sometimes said to be its purpose. I don’t know if it was finally considered successful. It didn’t win the war, that’s clear enough.
In the Gulf War that ended on February 28, 1991, a month after Butler became CINCSAC, SAC’s B-52s had again been brought in to conduct high altitude bombing missions with conventional bombs. Quite early in his time as CINCSAC, Butler had begun an analysis of their performance. Not good at all to start with, he found. Bombs missing targets a lot. Better later after some changes were made.
But was bombing with “conventional” bombs even part of SAC’s mission? And might that conventional bombing, whether it was called “tactical” in support of our troops in battle, or “strategic” in the World War II sense, not be done better now by our wonderful new fighter-bombers, the F-15s made by the McDonnell Douglas company and the F-16s made by General Dynamics companies, for example, using the new “precision-guided” weapons we’d developed? Those bombs could be flown in a window, it was being claimed. Video appeared on the newscasts that purported to show the precision.
For that matter, if we wanted them to, the new fighter-bombers could also deliver our B61 thermonuclear bombs. The B61s weighed only 700 pounds or so (the Hiroshima bomb had weighed close to 10,000 pounds). They also had been streamlined so they could be carried outside the airplanes. Different versions of the B61 could be set to yield from 2/3 of a Hiroshima to twenty-two Hiroshimas. The fuses in them could make the bombs detonate on contact or after coming down under a parachute or after a “lay-down” and delay. Now that’s versatility.
The more General Butler thought about it, the more clearly he saw the change that would be called for now. “By the first of June, 1991,” General Butler writes, five months after he became CINCSAC, he had concluded that
the potential of SAC’s systems could not be realized in their Cold War birthplace, steeped as it was in nuclear-oriented organization and thinking. Strategic Air Command had accomplished its core mission: nuclear attack from the Soviet Union had been deterred. The time had arrived to accept, indeed, celebrate that fortuitous outcome and inactivate SAC. (II, p. 104).
Inactivating SAC would be only one piece of what would need to follow, however. What exactly would happen with SAC’s vast assets, its aircraft—bombers and tankers, its reconnaissance and command and control airplanes, its crews, its bases? Some, not all, would be retired. Some would be reassigned. Where? What for?
Butler began to work out a plan that would affect very nearly the entire Air Force. There would be new commands with new names and somewhat different missions. Missions would be consolidated. For example, the Tactical Air Command would be renamed the Air Combat Command. The Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in SAC would be assigned to the ACC, as would SAC’s 500 bombers and its considerable reconnaissance assets. SAC’s tanker operations would be folded into a new Air Mobility Command, which would conduct not just air-refueling operations but cargo transport.
For the moment, SAC itself was a “specified” command—the only one in the Air Force. That meant it had a unique mission and its own reporting line straight to the President. It was not “joint” with any other command. It took orders only from the President or Secretary of Defense if speaking for the president. If SAC were to be replaced by a new Strategic Command, as General Butler had concluded it should be, it would become a “joint unified combatant command.” It would become, as Butler described it,
a planning headquarters for all U.S. strategic nuclear forces, ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers—forces that USSTRATCOM would command only in wartimes or while they were standing whatever nuclear alert was deemed appropriate for the time. (p. 104)
A change on this order was not something General Butler could order on his own, of course. He would need to get agreement from the Chief of the Air Force and from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell. And from the Chiefs of the other services.
On the 9th of July 1991, he called General “Tony” McPeak, the Chief of the Air Force, and told him he would be sending him a plan for this reorganization and that it would include the standing down of the Strategic Air Command.
“I will be most interested to see that,” General McPeak told him.
Shortly after McPeak saw General Butler’s plan, he got back in touch with General Butler to tell him that he and General Powell, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, would like him to brief the plan to an upcoming meeting of the Air Force top leadership group—the “four stars”—at the end of July 1991. The stated purpose of the meeting was evaluating the performance of the Air Force during the recently concluded Gulf War.
McPeak said he and General Powell thought Butler should brief the proposal just as it was. It would be presented as coming only from General Butler, however, the CINCSAC, not as from McPeak, the Acting Secretary of the Air Force, and Colin Powell, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs. Which would allow them to gauge the group’s reaction to it.
General Butler’s presentation was the last item on the agenda for the day. As he rose to speak, a table-mate, the commander of the Air Force Space Command, General Chuck Horner, said, “I hear you’re going to drop a bombshell.”
In the discussion after Butler’s half-hour presentation, General Mike Loh, the commander of the Tactical Air Command, asked “Lee, are you concerned about the inevitable morale issues in SAC?”
“That’s what I get paid for,” Butler said. “This is about doing what’s right.”
When Butler returned to his seat, General Horner, leaned over and whispered, “That would be a bombshell.” (p. 413)
What General Butler had proposed to the other commanders was the disestablishment of what for 45 years had been the most prestigious command in the Air Force. The command that handled the biggest nuclear weapons. The only “specified command.” The command of which he was the Commander in Chief. His command. The storied Strategic Air Command.
How often do we see something like that happen? Doing what is seen to be right in spite of the personal costs? In any domain? Let alone in a domain as permeated by rivalry among the services as our military services were. That’s what General Horner must have meant when he said, “That would be a bombshell.”
More common was the experience General Butler had had on his first assignment in the Pentagon. He’d been assigned to work on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties then being negotiated by the Nixon administration. His marching orders from his seniors were, "Butler, whoever’s arms end up being limited, they better not be the Air Force's."
Next: George Lee Butler XIII-2: SAC Stands Down