(2 of 8)
He is at one time a thoroughgoing professional and a global intellectual, a military and civilian thinker who, during off-duty hours on overseas tours, studied Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, even Chinese. During a South Pacific tour, his carousing comrades came upon him at night, studying by candlelight a book called Micronesian Languages, When he was an Air Force assistant attache in Moscow, he wrote some of the best air-intelligence reports about the Soviet Union that the U.S. had ever received. As a longtime Pentagon staff officer, he managed to steer clear of cliques and cabals, and win a reputation for sheer performance, for all-out mastery of Air Force doctrine and operations. "White," says a former commander, "has the ability to step back for a long look. He is not a home-run hitter. He's just the league's leading batter."
The Long Rifles. Tommy White's quiet but firm drive for perfection, his professional sense of urgency, are reflected at every level of the Air Force's 25,000-plane command—including 14,000 jets, 12,500 of them strike planes—to the point that his 900,000-man force lives all day, every day, by the doctrine of instant readiness. At Strategic Air Command bases from Okinawa to Limestone, Me. to Morocco, one-third of SAC's force of about 1,500 nuclear 6-47 medium jet bombers. 200 6-52 heavy jet bombers ("the long rifles") and 300 6-36 propjet bombers squat on their ramps on 24-hour alert, with tanks topped with fuel and nuclear weapons preloaded. SAC's new commander, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, has decreed that one-third of SAC's planes must be ready to take off within 15 minutes after an alarm. Nowhere was the 15-minute way of life more in evidence last week than in SAC's "front line," at the B-47 base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco.
In Sidi Slimane's dining hall, in briefing rooms and sleeping huts, the 6-473' three-man alert crews waited, always a few minutes' jeep ride from their aircraft, always together. ("It's like being married to these guys," says one young copilot, "only worse.") As Klaxon horns blared harshly and insistently through the sun-dried air, the combat crews dropped what they were doing and piled into their jeeps. (One coveralled pilot got notice of the alert when the warning light went on over the Catholic chapel altar, where he was at prayer.) Down premarked roadways they headed for their planes, where ground crews were already at work. Methodically they went down their take-off check lists (the long preflight checks had been done hours before, were done anew daily) and got ready to take off with a whine and a roar. Opening padlocked metal containers and black satchels, the combat crews checked the emergency war plans they had learned by heart in daily briefings in the U.S. and in Morocco, photographic and radar pictures of their preassigned targets in Russia, routes of approach and getaway, estimates of enemy defenses and radar capabilities, the latest of the global Strategic Air Command's four-hourly reports on the weather over the Soviet Union (cloudy to overcast more than half the time, necessitating radar bombing). Sidi Slimane's alert force met its deadline.