ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

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 Muellner
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.
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