Sierra Hotel

With the enthusiasm and credibility of a fighter pilot who actually rolled down the chute in Southeast Asia, C. R. "Lucky" Anderegg provides a "sierra hotel" account of how a small corps of dedicated fighter pilots capitalized on their combat experience and a vision of what should have occurred in Vietnam to sow the seeds of transformation that took root in the Tactical Air Force (TAF) during the decade that followed. Detailing significant advances in combat capability that sprang forth from fertile minds cultivated in the crucible of combat, Anderegg argues that the creation of the Aggressors and Red Flag marked the Fighter Mafia's crowning achievements since both served to ensure that the fruit of their many innovations fell upon Allied fighter crews in the following decades.Anderegg begins his work by examining the performance of Air Force fighter pilots in Vietnam's "school of hard knocks." Flying fighters designed for a nuclear confrontation with the Warsaw Pact, fighter crews went to Southeast Asia with inadequate training for the machines they flew and the conventional air war they faced. Highlighting numerous contributing factors, Anderegg astutely points to poor instructional methodology as the principal reason new fighter pilots arrived in-theater largely unprepared. Institutionalized by an entrenched fighter culture, training entailed upgrading pilots to learn by watching and copying the "old heads" rather than teaching them a logical method for tactical problem solving. These difficulties notwithstanding, the pragmatic fighter force of Vietnam did find better ways to get the job done by war's end.With that setting, Anderegg demonstrates how the fighter force experienced a grassroots transformation in the post-Vietnam years. As the old guard of senior veterans retired, a new corps emerged in its place comprised of less experienced yet more highly educated officers. Additionally, a changing of the guard occurred at the USAF Fighter Weapons School (FWS), long recognized as the temple of fighter-tactics training. Led by one operations officer and his cadre of instructors, the movement shed the old way in favor of a new building-block approach whereby the final objective of combat capability drove every aspect of training. The FWS codified this new methodology and disseminated it to the TAF along with several other innovations in two watershed issues of its Fighter Weapons Review, and the march was on.In the chapter "Let's Get Serious about Dive Toss," Anderegg metaphorically explains how the change in fighter culture pushed a bottom-up review of everything in the Air Force. As FWS instructors attempted to shift F-4E tactics away from manual dive-bombing towards more survivable and accurate dive toss using computed system deliveries, one FWS instructor wrote his famous "Dear Boss" letter to the commander of Tactical Air Command, highlighting root causes of a fighter-pilot exodus to the airlines. While the FWS cadre worked overtime to convert an entrenched fighter force to adopt a better tactic, one outspoken fighter pilot provided honest feedback to the top brass to do the same on a much grander scale. Of course, the rest is history, and so is the Dear Boss letter, which Anderegg thoughtfully includes as an appendix.