Nick Cook - The Hunt for Zero Point - Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology by Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology

Author:Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
Language: eng
Format: mobi

Chapter 14

There were two final way points on the invisible network of nodes and links that held the black world together and here was the first of them, the Pentagon, with its long, wide corridors leading to the offices of Lieutenant General George Muellner, principal deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. After a month's interlude in the U.K., I was back in Washington on official business.

It was Muellner's last day as the service's chief procurement officer. Tomorrow he retired, the culmination of a service career that had begun in the late '60s as a pilot flying F-4s out of Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam.

According to his bio, he had more than 5,300 hours on F-4s, A-7s, F-15s and F-16s. Muellner completed 690 combat missions over Vietnam and logged another 50 combat sorties during the Gulf War in 1991, at which time he commanded a deployment of Joint STARS battlefield surveillance aircraft. In 1991, Joint STARS was still officially under experimental test, but its belly-mounted radar proved invaluable in picking out Iraqi tanks and Scud launchers against the flat backdrop of the desert. It was, to use the jargon, an "enabling technology" that had helped the Coalition to win the war.

Another "enabler" had been stealth, a technology with which Muell ner was intimately familiar, although you would never guess it from his official past. The merest clue that he had once been bound up in the stealth revolution came in the fourth paragraph of the "assignments" section of his bio, the part that outlined the key milestones of his career. While the maximum period of time contained in each of the 17 other paragraphs covered a year, two at the most, the fourth paragraph spanned an unusually long length of time: May 1973 to July 1982.

During these nine years, Muellner's activities were described as "F-15 operational test pilot, 4486th Test Squadron, Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.; chief of systems testing, USAF Test Pilot School; test pilot with the F-16 Combined Test Force; and operations officer and commander, 6513th Test Squadron, testing classified aircraft." It was kind of like Pittman Station all over again.

146

So, Muellner had the Right Stuff in spades and he had lived a great deal of his professional life in the black. His nine years in the test community, it turned out, covered one of the most intense periods of development in the U.S. Air Force's history—a time when it had had to take a long hard look at its equipment and tactics and rapidly come up with a raft of new ideas and hardware to ensure that it was as ready for the next conflict as it had been ill-prepared for the one it had just fought and lost in Vietnam. It was this period that presaged the biggest hike in black world spending since the days of the first and most grandiose black world project of all: the bomb.

By even stepping into the building—the great edifice constructed by General Leslie Groves

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.