Everybody is perfectly aware that the European air forces showed up with small numbers of fighters, sometimes there was no ISR or support aircraft, tankers and so forth at all. As a general perception, the American perception is that we consequently saved the Europeans from an unnecessarily long war by showing up with our marvelously balanced version of airpower and making sure they can fight effectively. There is a certain amount of truth to that, but it does not go all the way. The simple fact is the United States Air Force found itself at its extreme during this conflict. It was all the Air Force could do given its global commitments to not only cover its deployment obligation, but to bring forces back, keep them trained for big wars, not Afghanistan or Iraq, rest people appropriately, maintain equipment appropriately and so forth. All those commitments were underway. way of the time.
We, that is the United States, had two deployments. We had deployments underway in every combat and command in the world at the time: A-1 type active operations going on. Those serial operations started as there was a major earthquake in Japan. That involved a lot of airlift and a certain amount of tanker support to take care of that. We had nuclear alert commitments; we had training commitments and so on. The United States Air Force was tapped out in any sense of its normal management procedure for major forces. The only way it could scram together a tanker fleet was if it went to the reserve forces and said: how about volunteering for 90 days? That is a diplomatic request to reserve for reasons I will not go into but I am sure your reserves are similarly away, or have similar kinds of consideration; but if as reserve volunteers they do not get credit for retirement later on, they will not get medical coverage for their family, nor other benefits. Asking reservist to volunteer for a weekend or a week is one thing. But to ask a reservist to volunteer for three months is asking a lot and yet they came forward.
Most of those tankers, approximately 20 tankers we sent were reserves, there was also a small unit of tankers that deployed to France from active duty in a station in England. But most of the force came out from our reserve forces. We can only find it that way. Congress never authorized or funded the operation, which meant that there was no funding for it, there was no money to pay the reserves, there was no money to reimburse the air force operations and so forth. Congress was at a major political dispute at the time, it had nothing to do with Libya, it had everything to do with the forthcoming elections and so forth. But as a consequence, the USAF goes to war without contractual authorization or funding. It pays reserves the money that is normally allocated to pay for reserve training, not reserve operations. So, this is a pretty difficult operation but the point is, when you look imbalanced, the Air Force was at a point when it was stressed out.
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