Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson announces that officials have selected Tinker Air Force Base to provide maintenance for the B-21 Raider once the bomber comes on line in the mid-2020s Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman.
AN announcement that Tinker Air Force Base will maintain the B-21 Raider once the bomber comes on line is good news for the base and another validation of central Oklahoma's longtime support of the base.
Tinker celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, a true milestone considering there was no guarantee it would get to 50 or 60. During the early 1990s, Tinker faced the threat of closure, or at least significant downsizing, as result of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process, which weighed the viability of all U.S. bases.
The state's congressional delegation lobbied hard for Tinker, and so did the community. A nonprofit group led by a former Tinker commander even asked metro-area cities to assist financially in the preservation effort, based on how many of their residents worked at Tinker. In Midwest City, council members set up a fund that allowed residents to “overpay their water bill and designate the extra mount be given to the task force,” a September 1994 story in The Daily Oklahoman noted.
Those efforts succeeded, allowing Tinker to prosper. Today, roughly 31,000 workers and their families are tied to Tinker, which has a $1.6 billion payroll. Lt. Gen. Lee Levy, former commander of the Air Force Sustainment Center at Tinker, would frequently note that the center is a $16 billion-a-year operation that would rank No. 116 if it were a Fortune 500 company.
Just two years ago, officials broke ground on a 158-acre KC-46 Sustainment Campus, on the site of what was once the BNSF Railway yard. That purchase, the result of an effort involving the Air Force, the city of Oklahoma City and Oklahoma County, will generate about 1,300 good-paying jobs maintaining the KC-46A Pegasus once that tanker begins flying.
Tinker is an important site with a strong record, something Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson noted earlier this month in naming the base to maintain the B-21 Raider.
“We made that decision because Tinker Air Force Base has the people and the experience and has shown its ability to provide sustainment to some of our most important aircraft,” Wilson said.
The B-21, a long-range stealth bomber, is expected to be delivered midway through the next decade, and is meant to replace the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit bombers. Wilson says she expects this project to translate into roughly the same number of jobs as the KC-46A mission.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, perhaps the Senate's most hawkish member and a staunch defender of all of Oklahoma's military installation, says adding the B-21 to Tinker's maintenance roster “puts Oklahoma at the forefront of the next generation of military aircraft and solidifies Tinker's rightful place as the nation's premier air logistics facility.”
Where the military is concerned, nothing is guaranteed. But Tinker is on solid footing, and news like that delivered by Wilson only underscores that.
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