Photo By Staff Sgt. Kate Thornton | A KC-135 Strantotanker from the 100th Air Refueling Wing refuels a B-2 Spirit from the...... read more read more
“131st Bomb Wing Citizen-Airmen.”
This could be either a salutation, or simply a title. As a title, it’s YOUR title: four little words (five if you don’t count the hyphen). These words are apt to describe you and your service. As such, they are heavy with honor and with significance – especially in light of current events of these past few weeks.
Immediately after January drill, nearly 30 wing Airmen rolled into Jefferson City, our Missouri capital, to assist in the inauguration ceremony for our new state Commander in Chief Eric Greitens. The service and professionalism of our Citizen-Airmen shone brightly – even as a Guard-piloted B-2 Spirit flew above for more than 6 million of our fellow Missouri citizens to see.
Not 48 hours later, just as many of our wing Airmen were back in uniform, away from jobs and homes and families, to respond to the threat to Missouri from a treacherous ice storm that blanketed a 1,000-mile swath of the central Midwest. In this mission, we practiced and proved our readiness to respond when needed, just as we have done countless times before, and as we assuredly will countless times again.
To pivot from drill to a state ceremony to disaster response, within a single week’s time: this sort of activity is common in an Air National Guard Wing. But as they say on TV, “Wait! There’s more!”
We’ve also been quite busy with our Federal mission. Overnight Thursday, our Citizen-Airmen were total-force partners with the active-duty 509th Bomb Wing, as together we conducted precision strikes against two ISIS terrorist camps in Libya. This combat operation was executed by two Whiteman B-2 strategic stealth bombers. The missions were planned, launched, carried out and recovered by a total-force team of operators, maintainers and munitions Airmen.
The Citizen-Airmen of the 131st were thick in this fight, and the missions that they helped carry out boldly demonstrated to ISIS – and to every other bad actor on the world stage – our nation’s readiness and resolve to strike, at anytime, anywhere on the globe. We’ve been entrusted to carry out the strategic B-2 mission alongside our fellow Airmen in the 509th, and we continue to prove to our nation that we’re strong for that task.
Just yesterday, a half dozen more of our wing’s finest Citizen-Airmen were in our Nation’s capital, alongside 7,500 other Guardsmen, to support our Nation’s Presidential Inauguration ceremonies. Also today, nearly 50 Combat Communicators are in the Middle East, providing deployed communications capabilities to our troops and our allies on the front lines, while several dozen B-2 operations and maintenance personnel are executing the Bomber Assurance and Deterrence mission with our 509th mission partners. If all that weren’t enough, in a few weeks, a couple dozen more from our Air Operations Group will head out the door yet again, this time to the Pacific Air Forces area of operations, to support combined military exercises with our allies there.
Tomorrow will bring different missions and new challenges; opportunities that we’re uniquely charged to meet. In the 131st, we are asked to do so much. And in the 131st, we demonstrate, again and again, our willingness, ability and excellence to do that, and so much more.
It is difficult for me to put into words how proud I am of the work you do every day. I am honored to be associated with you and work alongside you. I thank you and I salute you, the proud and the powerful of our Air National Guard wing. Because only you can call yourselves “131st Bomb Wing Citizen-Airmen.”
| Date Taken: | 01.24.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 01.24.2017 09:34 |
| Story ID: | 221130 |
| Location: | WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, MO, US |
| Web Views: | 92 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, Only in the 131st Bomb Wing, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
LEAVE A COMMENT