>From there, I went on to determine manpower resources by anticipated skills requirements, identify and set in motion urgent-immediate procedures to acquire (by standard practices or otherwise) relevant and current manuals and tech data, general and special hand tools, etc. More, to plan orientation and training for the program, upgrade skills for maintenance team workers, crew chiefs, and site and regional supervisors.
To design a team member notification system, and a procedure for ongoing liaison with Hqs USAFE (Lindsey Air Base, Weisbaden, Germany) to acquire opportune air transportation from selected pick-up points for the Mobile Maintenance Teams and drop-off at forward area emergency work sites. Put it all together, get staff and command approval in principle at Nouasseur, take the draft to Weisbaden and get staff preliminary sign-off by Hqs Air Material Force European Area and Hqs United States Air Force Europe (USAFE). Following that, to get the coordination of the Directors of Maintenance and the Commanders at Burtonwood Air Depot UK and Chatereaux Air Depot France (Burtonwood and Chatereaux depots' manpower, tools, and other resources were to be committed to the program, hence their being in the loop for sign-off.)
With that done, I would integrate and send the package off to Hq SAC,
Offutt AFB, Oklahoma and give them a crack at it.
Along the way, I got with SAC and other intelligence types and checked the lay of the land from Morocco east to Turkey.
Deployment
The three Directors of Maintenance at Nouasseur (Morocco), Chatereaux (France) and Burtonwood (UK) would assemble personnel committed to the Program, and using the previously authorized priorities request Base Commanders for opportune airlift to move skills, tools, supplies, tech data, etc., to the Program's initial assembly point in a specified hangar at Wheelus Field, Libya.
At Wheelus, the program manager (a Nouasseur Air Depot military officer and staff) would shuffle and combine the physically present skills, tools, etc., so that teams and their kits were formed, organized, equipped, and ready to move according to requirements and priorities to where they would be needed. Get the teams to their assigned stations by air, sea or land transport, each Civil Service employee equipped with personal gear adequate for survival under the anticipated conditions.
That, generally, was how it was supposed to work, but we knew better. The reality we saw was that as soon as the nuclear threshold was crossed, which was highly probable, a US/NATO-USSR general war wouldn't last much more than a couple of days. —- Several weeks after I coordinated the draft plan, my supervisor at Nousseur sent the final version to Hqs SAC. They replied that it was the best that could be expected under the circumstances. Not long afterward, I transferred back to the States where I got a job at McClellan AFB near Sacramento.
The plan was one of several that I drafted while at Nouasseur and at other places in those early days of the Cold War. Many personal anecdotes, from the deeply sad and poignant to the trivial and absurd, have been written about WW2, Korea, Viet Nam, and the other confrontations between the U S and the Soviets. The Cold War, in as many of its facets as possible, needs to be written about, including memoirs such as this, and they should be entered into the nation's lore so that students may view their many perspectives.
I spent almost two years in researching and drafting the details of this SAC support plan. Would it have worked if and when the need arose? Were there plans for other options? I don't know. Forward area emergency maintenance (Rapid Area Maintenance - RAM) teams, much more advanced in concept and application, were used in Viet Nam.