Fort Crook was laid out ten miles south of Omaha between 1894 and 1896 and named for Major General George Crook. Its flying field took a different name. First Lieutenant Jarvis Jenness Offutt, an Omaha-born Yale man who had gone to war through the Royal Flying Corps in Canada and became the first American exchange officer with the Royal Air Force’s No. 56 Squadron, died on 13 August 1918 after crashing an S.E.5 in France. He was Omaha’s first air casualty of the war.

The Douglas County Reserve Officers Association pushed for the field to carry his name. It was designated Offutt Field on 6 May 1924 and dedicated four days later, on 10 May, with his mother Bertha and brother Casper watching nineteen aeroplanes fly over. For the next five years the field handled air mail before the route moved to Omaha Municipal Airport in 1930. That might have been the whole story, had the war not arrived.

The Glenn L. Martin Company built a bomber plant beside the field between March and October 1941. The assembly building alone cost $10,775,395 and ran to roughly 1.2 million square feet, alongside two mile-long runways and six hangars. Production began in January 1942 and reached full scale on 8 June that year. Martin-Nebraska turned out 1,585 B-26 Marauders and, from 1944, B-29 Superfortresses at better than fifty a month.

How many B-29s is genuinely unsettled. Offutt’s own history fact sheet says 531, the Historic American Buildings Survey documentation says 515, and an article on the base website says 402. What is not in doubt is which ones. Twenty aircraft were built and modified here for the Silverplate atomic programme, among them Enola Gay, a B-29-45-MO, serial 44-86292, and Bockscar, a B-29-36-MO, serial 44-27297. Production ended on 8 September 1945.

Strategic Air Command moved its headquarters to Offutt at 12:01 a.m. on 9 November 1948. The attraction was geography and inheritance: a plant, runways and hangars already built, in the middle of the country and out of easy reach of Soviet bombers. In 1957 the command moved into Building 500, and underneath it went a command post that was, for its time, one of the most heavily protected rooms in the United States.

The original post was three storeys below ground, with walls and base floor two feet thick, intermediate floors ten inches and a roof between 24 and 42 inches. About a thousand people worked down there at peak, and it was provisioned to keep 800 alive for a fortnight. Ramped tunnels eight feet across, walled in two feet of reinforced concrete, joined it to the surface. From here SAC went to DEFCON 2 on 24 October 1962.

At the height of that alert SAC held 1,479 bombers, 1,003 tankers and 182 ballistic missiles ready. A second-generation command post, 16,000 square feet on two storeys with electromagnetic-pulse protection, opened in March 1989. When Strategic Air Command was inactivated on 1 June 1992 the joint United States Strategic Command took its place at Offutt, working from a two-level, 14,000-square-foot command centre wired to roughly 200 locations worldwide.

The 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing arrived at Offutt on 16 August 1966 and has never left. It became simply the 55th Wing on 1 September 1991. Today it runs six groups, 31 squadrons and around 7,800 people, with roughly 46 aircraft in thirteen models of seven types. An Air Force environmental assessment calls it the largest wing in Air Combat Command and the second largest in the Air Force. Its aircraft carry the tail code OF.

The backbone is the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint, seventeen aircraft that detect, identify and geolocate signals across the electromagnetic spectrum and push what they find to commanders in near real time. More than thirty people fly on each one: pilots, navigators, electronic warfare officers and intelligence operators. Four CFM turbofans of 21,600 pounds thrust each push it past 500 mph to 50,000 feet, with a range of 3,900 miles. Initial operational capability came in January 1964.

Three RC-135S Cobra Balls do something narrower and stranger. They fly Joint Chiefs of Staff-directed missions to collect optical and electronic data on ballistic targets in boost and re-entry, feeding treaty verification and missile-defence work, using a medium-wave infrared array and tracking radar. The Cobra Ball mission moved from Alaska to Offutt in 1994. Two RC-135U Combat Sents, recognisable by chin and wingtip antennae, cheek fairings and a stretched tail, find and fingerprint foreign radars.

Three WC-135R Constant Phoenix aircraft, delivered in July 2022, May 2023 and on 4 December 2023, sample the air for particles and gases that betray a nuclear test under the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. TC-135 trainers keep crews current without burning mission hours. Two OC-135B Open Skies observation aircraft flew treaty flights until the United States withdrew from the treaty on 22 November 2020; the last was flown to storage on 9 June 2021.

From 3 February 1961 an EC-135 airborne command post flew somewhere over the central United States every minute of every day, with a general officer aboard as Airborne Emergency Action Officer, able to assume the authority of the National Command Authority if Offutt were destroyed. Continuous airborne alert ran without a break until 24 July 1990: twenty-nine years, five months and twenty-one days, and more than 281,000 accident-free flying hours.

After July 1990 the aircraft stood ground or airborne alert around the clock instead. The Airborne Launch Control System aboard could fire Minuteman missiles if their silos and underground launch capsules had been destroyed. In October 1998 the Navy’s E-6B Mercury took the Looking Glass mission over from the Air Force EC-135s, and the airborne command post that Offutt had invented passed out of Air Force hands.

Offutt still keeps the last of the line. Four E-4B National Airborne Operations Center aircraft, militarised Boeing 747-200s, fly with the 1st Airborne Command and Control Squadron under the 595th Command and Control Group, activated on 6 October 2016. Each carries up to 111 people, is hardened against electromagnetic pulse and nuclear thermal effects, and can stay up twelve hours unrefuelled. On 26 April 2024 Sierra Nevada Corporation won a contract worth up to about $13 billion to replace them.

A frozen February left the ground unable to absorb anything. When two to three inches of rain fell on 14 March 2019 on top of a heavy snowpack, it all ran off at once. Federal levee R-613 failed near the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri, and the water came around behind levee R-616, which protects Offutt. By 16 March roughly a third of the 4,041-acre base was under water and the lower half of the runway was submerged.

Nine aircraft got out: eight RC-135s to Lincoln Air National Guard Base and MacDill Air Force Base, and an E-4B. Water stood eight feet deep in some buildings and two feet inside the Bennie L. Davis maintenance complex. In the end 137 facilities were damaged, about 3,200 people lost their workplaces, 1.2 million square feet of workspace and 118,000 square feet of secure compartmented space were destroyed, and 60 buildings were written off.

The flying mission never stopped. Standing water lingered into late 2019 and drew waterfowl onto the airfield, a bird-strike problem of its own; an eighteen-month, $227 million runway replacement finished in September 2022. The bill kept climbing. The Air Force first asked for $420 million; Congress provided just under $800 million and added $100 million in the 2022 defence authorisation; by January 2022 Representative Don Bacon put the full cost at $1.1–1.2 billion.

USSTRATCOM’s replacement command and control facility broke ground in October 2012 with a programmed amount of $564 million. It did not go well. The Department of Defense Inspector General published report DODIG-2018-122 on 31 May 2018, finding that costs had risen 9.4 per cent to $617.1 million as of February 2018 and that construction was twenty-nine months behind, with completion pushed to 2 August 2018.

The causes read like a catalogue. The Inspector General listed a lack of expert involvement in requirements development, inaccurate cost estimates, design deficiencies, contract modifications, fire, floods and mould. Failures in the permanent earth retention system walls cost three months. Mould discovered in September 2015 forced the remanufacture of more than 10,000 of 66,000 linear feet of ductwork and cost eight months more. A fire followed in April 2017.

The building was dedicated on 18 November 2019 as the General Curtis E. LeMay Command and Control Facility. Figures for it vary: the Inspector General describes a design of 1,085,748 square feet with two underground levels, while USSTRATCOM cites 916,000 square feet, more than 3,000 people and some 650 miles of internal cable. Press reporting at the dedication put the whole programme at about $1.3 billion, well above the construction contract the Inspector General audited.