Loh to USAF: Ellsworth Move “Irresponsible”: Retired Air Force Gen. Mike Loh is making one last effort to help save Ellsworth AFB, S.D., from the BRAC axe. The former Air Force vice chief of staff provided videotaped testimony against the Pentagon plan to shutter Ellsworth and shift its B-1B bombers to Dyess AFB, Tex., when BRAC commissioners traveled to South Dakota in June. Loh has now written a letter to the commission because he is “more convinced now than I was in June that the Pentagon is wrong,” he tells the Rapid City Journal. In his letter, Loh claims the Pentagon decision to downsize to a single B-1B base is “irresponsible.”
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t see great value in trying to break the Sentinel ICBM program off as a separate budget item the way the Navy has with its ballistic-missile submarine program, saying such a move wouldn’t create any new money for the Air Force to spend on other…