Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, October 2008.

“That looks ominous.”

“The weatherbugs say that we’re due for thunderstorms with heavy rain and strong winds this afternoon. The main storm line is passing well east of us, probably coming no closer that Sedalia. We should be all right here.”

“We’d better be. There isn’t a vacant hangar on the base.” And that, General Walter Cochrane thought was the honest truth. Once long ago, or so it seemed, the bad old days when aircraft would spend tens of hours on the ground getting fixed for every one they spent flying, seemed to have gone. The F-14 had required 50 man-hours of maintenance for every flight hour, the F-111 had needed eighty and they had been considered great improvements on what had gone before. The F-18H and F-16Gs that were now entering the Air Force and Navy inventory required just five.

Now the problem was back again and it wasn’t just the fact that the F-111 and the F-14 had both been pulled out of the boneyard and returned to service. It was where they were flying. Hell was not a good environment for the operation of aircraft, the pumice dust that saturated the atmosphere clogged engines and abraded airframes, sending maintenance requirements skywards. The life of engines between complete strip-down and rebuilds had dropped by two orders of magnitude, back almost to Second World War levels while the need for airframe refurbishment had soared to an intolerable degree. The result, inevitably, was that serviceability rates had fallen to appalling levels. Before the Salvation War had started, the USAF demanded 80 – 90 percent availability rates for its front line aircraft, privately Cochrane admitted that had been an optimistic target, but now they were down in the 20 to 30 percent. For all its expansion over the nine months since the Salvation War had started, the Air Force wasn’t actually fielding more aircraft than it had done pre-war. If it hadn’t been for the museum relics and boneyard salvage filling out the numbers, the situation would be dire.