The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group is not a scrapyard, whatever the aerial photographs suggest. It is a unit of the Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, occupying 2,600 acres at the eastern end of Davis-Monthan and holding on average around 3,200 aircraft and some 6,100 engines. None of it belongs to AMARG: title stays with the delivering service, and the group acts as custodian, parts broker, depot and undertaker in turn for all five Department of Defense services, several federal agencies and allied governments.

The site exists because of dirt and air. Southern Arizona offers low humidity, sparse rainfall and enough altitude to hold corrosion at bay for decades. Underfoot lies a hard alkaline topsoil roughly six inches deep over a clay-like sublayer called caliche, firm enough that a loaded bomber can be towed across open ground and parked on it without paving.

Preparation is a grind. Guns and ejection seats are disarmed, fuel systems drained and flushed with lubricating oil, and every intake, seam and gap sealed before the aircraft is coated in Spraylat — a vinyl compound laid on in two passes, a dark sealing layer beneath a white reflective one, which holds interior temperatures within roughly fifteen degrees of ambient air. Crews apply it before ten in the morning, because skin temperatures then pass 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Everything then falls into one of four categories. Type 1000 is inviolate long-term storage, kept intact against a future recall. Type 2000 aircraft are the donors, picked over to keep operational fleets flying. Type 3000 is short-term holding for airframes awaiting transfer, and Type 4000 covers aircraft stripped of anything useful and destined for the smelter. AMARG averages roughly a hundred aircraft a year regenerated or prepared for regeneration, and reclaims 5,000 to 6,000 parts annually worth $250 million to $300 million.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty did not simply require the United States to retire bombers. It required them to be visibly, verifiably destroyed, and it specified how. The treaty’s Conversion or Elimination Protocol reads like a butcher’s diagram: the tail section with its tail surfaces shall be severed from the fuselage at a location obviously not an assembly joint; the wings separated from the fuselage by any method; and the remainder of the fuselage severed into two pieces within the area where the wings attach, again at a point obviously not an assembly joint.

Then came the part that gave the boneyard its most famous images. The remains had to be left in the open, visible to the other side’s national technical means of verification — reconnaissance satellites, in plain language — for ninety days before removal. Tucson spent years with rows of dismembered Stratofortresses laid out in the sun like specimens on a tray, arranged so an orbiting camera could count them.

The method was brutally simple: a 13,000-pound steel blade was hoisted by crane and dropped, crashing down four times on each aircraft, shearing off the wings and leaving the fuselage in three parts. Five pieces per bomber, roughly ninety tons of aluminium, and a photograph that said more about the end of the Cold War than any communique.

START I was signed in July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994. New START, signed on 8 April 2010, required reductions to central limits by 5 February 2018; thirty-nine B-52Gs were eliminated at Davis-Monthan to meet them, the last — serial 58-0224 — on 19 December 2013.

The 355th Tactical Fighter Wing was reactivated at Davis-Monthan on 1 July 1971 with the A-7D Corsair II. The A-10 arrived on 2 March 1976, the wing was redesignated the 355th Tactical Training Wing on 1 September 1979, and the last A-7D mission was flown that October. From then on Tucson was the Warthog’s schoolhouse. In Desert Storm the type flew some 8,100 sorties at a 95.7 per cent mission-capable rate, and crews deployed continuously thereafter, from Operation Southern Watch in 1992 to Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea.

The unwinding was slow and then abrupt. On 6 February 2024 the first Davis-Monthan A-10, 82-0648, taxied across the field into AMARG — a retirement flight measured in yards rather than miles. That September the 354th Fighter Squadron, the Bulldogs, inactivated. The final A-10 sortie from the base was flown on 29 July 2026 by Lieutenant Colonel Rodney Dwyer, commander of the 355th Operations Group. Three remaining aircraft left for Moody Air Force Base, Georgia on 5 August 2026.

What replaces the mission is not another attack wing. Announced on 25 April 2023, the 492nd is moving from Hurlburt Field, Florida as a power projection wing under Air Force Special Operations Command, built for special operations strike, mobility, intelligence and air-to-ground integration. The plan was later refined: the MC-130J and special tactics units were dropped, replaced by two OA-1K Skyraider II squadrons and a CV-22 Osprey squadron. An initial detachment stood up in autumn 2024, headquarters activation is scheduled for summer 2027, and full operational capability is targeted for fiscal 2028.

Alongside it, electronic attack is growing. The 55th Electronic Combat Group is trading the EC-130H Compass Call for the EA-37B, a Gulfstream G550 conversion with markedly more range, speed and altitude; the first Air Combat Command example arrived on 23 August 2024. The shape of the future base is clear: less close air support, more of everything that has to arrive quietly and quickly.

Rescue is the quieter half of Davis-Monthan’s reputation and arguably the harder job. The 563rd Rescue Group directs flying operations for active-duty combat search and rescue, realigned under the 355th Wing on 1 October 2018, and runs seven squadrons and roughly 1,125 personnel across two geographically separated locations.

The pieces fit together in a specific way. The 79th Rescue Squadron flies HC-130J Combat King II tankers, refuelling helicopters in flight and working low at night on goggles. The 55th Rescue Squadron flies the helicopters — historically the HH-60G Pave Hawk, now increasingly the HH-60W Jolly Green II. The 48th Rescue Squadron holds the pararescuemen who actually reach the survivor, treat them and get them out; the 68th trains the Guardian Angel force.

What that looks like in practice was shown in May 2014, when a distress call reported badly burned sailors aboard a Venezuelan fishing vessel more than 1,100 nautical miles off the Mexican coast, picked up from a sunken Chinese boat. The group launched 38 airmen with two HC-130Js, three HH-60 Pave Hawks and an Arizona Air National Guard KC-135. Pararescuemen jumped with zodiac boats and medical kit to stabilise the casualties, who were hoisted out and flown via Cabo San Lucas to a burn facility in California.

Second Lieutenant Samuel Howard Davis, born on 20 November 1896 in Dyer County, Tennessee, graduated from the University of Arizona in 1917. On 28 December 1921, in DeSoto County, Florida, the Curtiss JN-6 he was flying with student Second Lieutenant William Sinclair struck a mechanical problem, spun in and crashed; both died in the fire that followed. First Lieutenant Oscar Monthan, born on 4 June 1885 in Dewsbury, England, was aboard a Martin MB-2 bomber on a test flight at Luke Field, Hawaii on 27 March 1924 when it struck an obstacle at the end of the runway, killing him and four others. Both are buried at Evergreen Memorial Park in Tucson, and the city, having lost two airmen in three years, hyphenated the name rather than choose.

Tucson had established a municipal landing field on the site remarkably early, and by the late 1920s Davis-Monthan Field was described as the largest municipal airport in the United States. On 23 September 1927 Charles Lindbergh brought the Spirit of St. Louis in before a crowd reported at around 20,000, and dedicated the field that evening at a banquet on the university commons.

The Army took the field over in September 1940, runways and warehouses going up in roughly eight months. Renamed Davis-Monthan Army Air Field on 1 December 1941, it became the country’s third-largest B-24 Liberator training base and received B-29s in 1945 after a $1.5 million upgrade. Aircraft storage began in April 1946 with surplus C-47s and B-29s; the base took its present name on 13 January 1948, and the storage operation has run continuously ever since.

For twenty-two years Davis-Monthan ran the most destructive weapons ever fielded from Arizona, almost none of it visible from the base itself. The 390th Strategic Missile Wing was activated at Davis-Monthan on 28 November 1961 to prepare for the Titan II, a liquid-fuelled intercontinental ballistic missile kept ready in a hardened silo. Two squadrons split the ring of complexes around Tucson: the 570th Strategic Missile Squadron took nine sites north and west of the city, the 571st nine to the south. Eighteen silos in all, each with a crew of four on alert around the clock.

The first missile arrived on 27 November 1962. The 570th was fully operational on 13 June 1963 and the 571st on 30 November that year. Each missile carried a W-53 warhead rated at nine megatons, sitting under farmland and desert within easy driving distance of a growing American city. Deactivation began on 1 October 1982, the last missile was removed in May 1984, and the wing was inactivated that July.

Seventeen of the eighteen complexes were destroyed. One was not. Missile Complex 571-7, on Duval Mine Road near Green Valley, was preserved and opened as the Titan Missile Museum — the only Titan II site anywhere a member of the public can descend into, walk the cableway and look down at a real missile in its silo.