The Air Force sure knows where to plot its future. Later this week, the Air Force Association, the service’s independent lobbying arm, is conducting a so-called Global Warfare Symposium to delve into the challenges of “the nuclear enterprise, cyberspace, expeditionary forces and space.”
Better plotting Air Force war plans here, at the Beverly Hilton...
(Military types have begun referring to the nation’s nuclear forces as “the nuclear enterprise” after those embarrassing lapses involving nuclear components that led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to cashier a pair of top Air Force leaders. It’s not to be confused with the nuclear Enterprise, the world’s first atomic-powered aircraft carrier still sailing after nearly 50 years.) Keynote speakers will include Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and General Norton Schwartz, the service’s top officer.
The Air Force Association isn’t holding its warfare symposium in some drab, suburban Washington Marriott or an out-of-the-way Air Force base on the Great (but frigid) Plains of this county where our ICBMs and bombers are actually based (Wyoming or North Dakota anyone?). Instead, the Air Force brass and their boosters will be forced to fly to sunny Beverly Hills, California, to spend several days cooped up inside the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
...than at a cold Air Force base / Hilton, DoD photos
“Smartly situated at the intersection of world-famous Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards and a mere three blocks from Rodeo Drive, The Beverly Hilton is just minutes from Hollywood, Downtown and the beaches,” the hotel notes on its website (and you thought beaches were a Marine mission). “It’s the only way we can get people to come,” an organizer says of the posh locale.
The symposium begins Thursday morning and ends mid-day Friday in plenty of time for the evening’s Air Force Ball (“The cost for a table of ten, 10, is $3,000,” the Air Force Association notes on its registration website. “AFA will seat FOUR guests at each table. DoD guests will be seated randomly at our industry tables. Final selection, invitation and random seating process will be administered solely by the Air Force Association”…sounds like some wedding receptions I’ve known.) Following the ball, attendees have a weekend in L.A. to deepen that California tan enough to engender familial jealously over Thanksgiving.
The Beverly Hilton knows all about the challenges posed by airpower. Conrad Hilton hired the Goodyear blimp to float above the place at its 1955 opening. “The blimp attempted to sprinkle small golden starbursts onto the community below,” the hotel’s history notes. “However, the concept did not actually work – the pieces of confetti got stuck together.” The Air Force Association, assuming it has a blimp at this week’s confab, will probably avoid that problem by using GPS-guided confetti.