US airmen needed to prioritize which areas of the base received power during the outage earlier this month at Incirlik AB, Turkey, forcing airmen to sleep on cots in their work places. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Tuesday that she spoke Monday with the Incirlik commander, who said base operations were returning to normal and the relationship with Turkish troops on base was no problem during the July 15 attempted coup. “People were doing well” during the outage, James said. However, there was not enough reserve fuel to power the entire base. That means non-mission-critical buildings were not powered, and airmen needed to sleep in their work areas because those were the only places with air conditioning. “The biggest hardship was the lack of A/C,” James said Tuesday at a Defense One event in Washington, D.C. Once air space was reopened to military aircraft, the base continued striking ISIS despite the power outage.
Happy Birthday US Air Force: 78 Today
Sept. 18, 2025
Seventy-eight years ago today, on Sept. 18, 1947, Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson swore in Stuart Symington as the first ever Secretary of the Air Force, and the Air Force officially became the first new military service since the Revolutionary War.
