The Titan II missile wasn’t the only Air Force weapon system having maintenance problems. Amid the defense cutbacks following the Vietnam War, the purchase of new planes and missiles had a much higher priority than buying spare parts for the old ones. During the late 1970s, on a typical day, anywhere from one half to two thirds of the Air Force’s F-15 fighters were grounded for mechanical reasons. The Strategic Air Command had lost more than half of its personnel since 1961. Some of its B-52 bombers were twenty-five years old. And SAC’s aura of invincibility had taken a beating. The highest-ranking officers in the Air Force tended to be “bomber generals” who’d risen through the ranks at SAC — and many of the pilots who flew bombing missions in Vietnam resented their insistence on rigid, centralized control. Tactics designed for executing the SIOP proved ineffective during combat in Vietnam, where the targets were often mobile and flying in a rigid formation could get you shot down. American pilots began to disobey orders, ignore their designated targets, bomb those that seemed more urgent, and lie about it in their reports.
Chuck Horner — who flew more than a hundred missions in Vietnam and later commanded the U.S. and allied air campaign during the first Gulf War — resented the inflexible, “parent-child relationship” that SAC’s bomber generals often demanded. He felt a tremendous anger, shared by many other young officers, about how the Air Force leadership had behaved during the Vietnam War:
I didn’t hate them because they were dumb, I didn’t hate them because they had spilled our blood for nothing, I hated them because of their arrogance… because they had convinced themselves that they actually knew what they were doing and that we were too minor to understand the “Big Picture.” I hated my own generals, because they covered up their own gutless inability to stand up to the political masters in Washington and say, “Enough. This is bullshit. Either we fight or we go home.”
Horner vowed that he would “never again be a part of something so insane and foolish.” After the war, thousands of young officers left the Air Force, profoundly disillusioned. Many of those who stayed were determined to change things. And the influence of the Strategic Air Command gradually diminished, as a younger generation of “fighter generals,” who rejected centralization and standardization and rigid planning, who had firsthand experience in real combat and little interest in abstract theories about nuclear war, rose to power.
During the years following the Vietnam War, antimilitary sentiment in the United States became stronger, perhaps, than at any other time in the nation’s history. Vietnam veterans were routinely depicted in books and films as racists, stoners, nutcases, and baby killers. Morale throughout the armed services suffered — and illegal drug use soared. By 1980, according to the Pentagon’s own surveys, about 27 percent of all military personnel were using illegal drugs at least once a month. Marijuana was by far the most popular drug, although heroin, cocaine, and LSD were being used, too. Among the armed services, the Marines had the highest rate of drug use: about 36 percent regularly smoked pot. About 32 percent of Navy personnel used marijuana at least once a month; the proportion of Army personnel was about 28 percent. The Air Force had the lowest rate, about 14 percent. It also had the most powerful warheads and bombs. The surveys by the Department of Defense most likely understated the actual amount of drug use. Random urine tests of more than two thousand sailors at naval bases in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California, found that almost half had recently smoked pot. Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.
Donald Meyer served as a corporal with the 74th United States Field Artillery Detachment in Germany during the early 1970s. His detachment kept Pershing missiles on alert, ready to fire within fifteen minutes. Each missile carried an atomic warhead ten to twenty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Meyer told the Milwaukee Journal that almost every one of the more than two hundred men in his unit regularly smoked hashish. They were often high while handling secret documents and nuclear warheads. A survey found that one out of every twelve members of the United States Army in Germany was smoking hashish every day. “You get to know what you can handle,” Meyer said. “Too much hash and you would ruin a good thing.”
