There are numerous cases of military service running in families, sometimes at the highest levels. Think John McCain, for example, whose grandfather was a top admiral in World War II. But there’s generational service and then there’s almost eerie cloning. The Air Force just gave us a neat example of the latter, in announcing that Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets IV would become commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, which operates America’s 20 B-2 stealth nuclear bombers.
World War II history buffs might be nodding at this point, remembering another Tibbets who served his country at one of its most dramatic moments. Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets, Jr. (then a Colonel), was given command of the 509th Composite Group in the closing months of World War II. One of the Army Air Force’s finest bomber pilots, Colonel Tibbets (who died in 2007 at the age of 92) was chosen to prepare America’s first nuclear combat mission. Flying a modified and supercharged B-29 named for his mother, the Enola Gay, Tibbets commanded the mission to Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic bomb in history. As Richard Rhodes made clear in his classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Tibbets’s mission was no ordinary bombing run, and it was he who came up with the entirely new procedures for flying and dropping what was then the world’s most powerful bomb.
Now, his grandson is in charge of America’s nuclear bombers. It is entirely possible that on Brigadier General Tibbets’s watch Iran will build its first nuclear weapon. Certainly, Russia will be modernizing its nuclear forces (and making more nuclear threats), and China increasing its growing missile force, as our post-Cold War holiday from nukes comes to an end. As all this happens, the junior Tibbets, along with his colleagues in U.S. Strategic Command and the U.S. Air Force’s Global Strike Command, will ensure that America has a flexible, multi-layered nuclear deterrence capability. Some may think bombers are a thing of the past, but they are actually becoming more important in a world of nuclear proliferation, especially given the recent news that North Korea may already possess up to 20 nuclear bombs. That is one reason the Air Force will soon be awarding a contract to build the next generation of bomber, known as the Long Range Strike Bomber, which will have both conventional and nuclear missions, and act as a far more flexible instrument of deterrence than either land- or sea-based missiles.
Given that the new bombers won’t come online until sometime in the 2020s, and will last for decades after that, history aficionados can only hope that around 2035, Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets V will take over the guidon of the 509th, helping keep America safe like his father and great-grandfather before him.
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