All,

After reviewing some of my Korea blogs, I realized I had neglected to post the explanation for the title of this edition.

"Blazing Skies" is a term used in Air Defense to begin an Operational Readiness Evaluation. Imagine a PATRIOT site in a relatively degraded state of alert. Launchers and radars off, crews at minimum manning, maybe someone on the radio. Next thing you know, the evaluator hit team comes screaming up to the site in a .gov vehicle and announcing "Blazing Skies!" (typically followed with an expletive in the plural).

At this point it's game on. Imagine a firehouse that just got a call, or a bunch of SWAT guys at dinner with their pagers going off at the same time. A flurry of activity ensues to bring the site to the specified state of alert. The actual amount of time we have is classified, but the end-state is a hot radar, hot launchers with hot missiles, and a fully manned site all pointed in the right direction, ready for war. In the purest sense of the concept, this is what we do.

As opposed to the Air Battle training side, this is the no-shit operational part that the crews must master to be proficient at their jobs. A monkey can be trained to do some of the tasks to complete an air battle, but it takes a truly proficient officer with a great breadth and depth of knowledge of his/her weapons system to truly understand what is happening during an ORE. Stuff breaks, crews forget to turn something on, radios take a dump. All of these things have to be dealt with in a decisive, calm manner because when its finally time to run the drill at 3 in the morning because we are going to war, you have to be able to figure it out.

3 paragraphs later, thats why the title is "Blazing Skies."

-D