Air Boss

From her base in Germany, Major General Maggie Woodward ruled the skies over Libya. It was another first for women in combat

  • Baerbel Schmidt for TIME

    Major General Maggie Woodward

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    Woodward entered the service after graduating from Arizona State University in 1982 and was soon piloting KC-135 tankers as they refueled fighters and bombers in midair during U.S. military action in Panama and the Balkans. She later ran tanker operations over Afghanistan and Iraq. Woodward racked up nearly 4,000 hours of flight time along the way and garnered a funky call sign: Swamp Witch. Today she is one of only 612 women — less than 5% — among the Air Force's 13,000 pilots. (Woodward is married to an Air Force one-star general, now retired; the couple has no children.)

    In 2007 she became the first woman to run the 89th Airlift Wing — home to Air Force One and other VIP craft — at Andrews Air Force Base just outside the capital, where, other brass recall, she was popular and effective. "Successful general officers know how to take care of the troops and let the troops take care of the mission," says William Welser III, a retired lieutenant general who was once Woodward's commander. "Maggie certainly falls into that category."

    Last summer, Woodward was promoted to run the 17th Air Force, part of the two-year-old U.S. Africa Command (Africom), which oversees U.S. military operations on the continent but for historical and logistical reasons is headquartered in Germany. Once President Obama ordered the no-fly zone, it fell to Woodward to make it happen. When the balloon went up, Woodward spent hours in the air-ops center at Ramstein air base, where more than 100 headset-wearing personnel, arrayed at a half-dozen rows of computer screens, monitored secret radio, video and instant messages. Woodward rarely sat at her command post on the war room's left side, instead roaming from desk to desk — from intelligence to operations to coalition partners — picking up new details and issuing instructions.

    Not everything went perfectly. An 18-month-old baby was killed, apparently by an air strike on an ammo dump south of Tripoli that sent a tank round into his bedroom. Weather grounded most of Woodward's AC-130s and A-10 tank-killing planes in the final days of the U.S. operation. She and her team held their breath when two F-15 flyers were forced to parachute into Libya after their plane malfunctioned. (The pilot was rescued quickly; his weapons officer was put up in a hotel by anti-Gaddafi forces until he could be picked up several hours later.) "That was a very emotional night and morning for all of us," she says. "The cheers that rose up from the floor in that air-operations center when we got the word that both crew members were safe were deafening."

    Woodward dismisses grumbles from some Air Force veterans that a shooting air war should have been commanded by a fighter or bomber pilot. "That's one reason they call us general officers," she notes. "We're no longer the technical experts. We have to be able to listen to the experts and make good decisions."

    Nothing Left to Shoot?
    Of course, it's much easier to scramble the jets than it is to craft a policy that will make Gaddafi go away. The Administration points out that the allies agreed only to protect Libyan civilians. "We've tried regime change before," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "and sometimes it's worked, and sometimes it's taken 10 years." The White House is weighing sending more aid — initially nonlethal supplies like medicine and body armor — to help the rebels, who are complaining about a lack of allied air strikes since Woodward relinquished command. But there is concern in the Pentagon and elsewhere that any weapons pipeline to Benghazi would put the U.S. on the side of fighters it knows very little about. The most fervent U.S. hope, as Gates put it, "is that a member of his own family kills him or one of his inner circle kills him."

    But there's not much sign of that possibility yet. Though some members of the Tripoli government have defected, there are widening rifts among rebel factions as well. Meanwhile, NATO warplanes circle overhead, but because Woodward's destruction of the Libyan air force was so complete, there is little left to do.

    Woodward has returned to her normal job as Africom's air boss, managing relations with 53 countries and their militaries. She hopes to squeeze in some horseback-riding time before long but says she is not frustrated by the situation on the ground. "I was given a very clear objective," she says, "and I feel very good that we were able to accomplish those objectives."

    For now, not everyone in the Libyan theater can make the same claim.

    This article originally appeared in the April 18, 2011 issue of TIME.

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