The field was established on 7 June 1943 as Mile 26 Satellite Field, an overflow strip for Ladd Field at Fairbanks. Its name came from a United States Army Signal Corps telegraph station and the milepost on the Richardson Highway that marked the spot. Construction began on 25 August 1943 and was signed off on 17 October 1944, a fourteen-month job costing something in the order of eight million dollars. The first aircraft to use it, a light L-5, landed on 11 June 1944.

On 13 January 1948 the field was redesignated Eielson Air Force Base for Carl Ben Eielson, and the base passed to Alaskan Air Command. Eielson was born at Hatton, North Dakota, on 20 July 1897 to Norwegian immigrant parents. In February 1924 he flew Alaska’s first air mail, Fairbanks to McGrath, in under three hours over a route dog teams needed up to thirty days to cover. In April 1928 he and the Australian explorer George Hubert Wilkins flew from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen, the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean from North America to Europe.

He did not live to see any of it named after him. On 9 November 1929 Eielson and his mechanic Earl Borland disappeared flying towards the trading ship Nanuk, frozen in off the Siberian coast, to bring out passengers and a cargo of furs. He was 32. The wreck was found the following winter near the Amguema River, and accounts differ: the Encyclopedia Arctica places the discovery in January 1930, while other records put the recovery of the two men’s bodies on 18 February 1930. A memorial to him was dedicated at the base on 20 July 1957.

Strategic Air Command arrived in late 1947, when the 97th Bombardment Group deployed from Smoky Hill Army Air Base, Kansas, with B-29s; sources place the move in November and on 1 December 1947, and the difference is probably advance party against main body. For the next sixteen years Eielson took rotations of B-29, B-50, B-36 and B-47 wings, put on alert and held ready. The deployments ran until 1963. The 5010th Combat Support Group, later the 5010th Air Base Wing, existed principally to host them and remained the resident organisation until 1981.

The runway is what those bombers left behind. SAC lengthened the wartime strip to roughly 14,500 ft in the late 1940s, which at the time made it the longest in North America. Eielson’s own public affairs office now gives 14,507 ft (4,422 m) and calls it the second longest runway on the continent; other published figures give 14,530 ft (4,428 m), and the difference is small enough to be a matter of where the survey starts. It is concrete, single, and aligned 14/32.

The commonly repeated claim that the runway is long because it was a Space Shuttle emergency landing site does not survive checking: no published NASA list of shuttle emergency or transoceanic abort landing sites includes Eielson, or any Alaskan airfield. The heavy-bomber explanation, by contrast, is documented and dull. Maintaining the thing is the current problem. In summer 2023 the 354th Civil Engineer Squadron closed the runway for a month to replace four full-depth concrete slabs, reseal joints, regroove the surface and repair the instrument landing system.

On 3 September 1949 a WB-29 flew the routine weather reconnaissance run from Misawa in Japan to Eielson carrying special filters designed to catch the radiological debris of an atmospheric nuclear test. Back at Eielson a large Geiger counter was run over the filters and found radioactive traces. It was logged as the 112th alert of the Atomic Energy Detection System, and after further analysis President Truman announced on 23 September 1949 that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic device. The first proof of the Soviet bomb was read off a filter paper in Alaska.

That work never stopped. Detachment 460 at Eielson, reporting to the Air Force Technical Applications Center, monitors natural and man-made seismic disturbances for the nuclear treaty monitoring mission. It runs five seismic arrays across Alaska containing thirty-five instruments, and atmospheric sampling equipment at three further Alaskan locations. In the late 1950s roughly 200 AFTAC personnel were spread across six Alaskan detachments; the network has shrunk and become far more capable.

The flying side of the same business was the 6th Strategic Wing, established at Eielson on 25 March 1967, which operated RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft and KC-135 tankers from the base until 1992. Its RC-135S Cobra Ball aircraft were built around optical and electronic sensors for watching ballistic missile re-entries, and the wing sat at the end of the Soviet Union’s test ranges. Eielson also launched U-2 air-sampling sorties over the polar cap under Project Star Dust, one of which nearly became a diplomatic catastrophe in October 1962.

COPE THUNDER began at Clark Air Base in the Philippines in 1976, conceived by Brigadier General Richard G. Head to give Pacific aircrews a realistic first taste of combat. The reasoning behind it is blunt and still quoted on the Air Force’s own fact sheets: most combat losses happen during an aircrew’s first eight to ten missions, so the exercise exists to use up those missions in peacetime. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in June 1991 and Clark was abandoned, the exercise had nowhere to go.

It went to Alaska. COPE THUNDER moved to Eielson in 1992, chosen for the sheer quantity of training airspace above the interior, and was re-designated RED FLAG-Alaska in 2006. The 353rd Combat Training Squadron, at Eielson since August 1993, plans and controls it, running the three Alaskan weapons ranges with their threat emitters and target arrays. A typical iteration brings more than 700–1,000 people and up to 60 aircraft to Eielson, with a further 500 people and 40 aircraft at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

The airspace figures vary with the source and the year, and the variation is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex fact sheet gives 65,000 square miles of airspace plus 2,490 square miles of land and 42,000 square nautical miles over the Gulf of Alaska; the RED FLAG-Alaska fact sheet says more than 67,000; the 353rd cites more than 68,000 across 18 military operations areas; Eielson’s 2025 press releases say more than 77,000. Whichever figure is used, it is several times the Nevada complex behind Red Flag at Nellis.

The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure round came close to hollowing Eielson out. The Department of Defense proposed removing the aircraft and keeping the base as an enclave for large training exercises; the BRAC Commission rejected that, judging it a waste of the installation. What survived the process was a compromise: the F-16s stayed, the A-10s went. Lieutenant Colonel Quentin Rideout flew the last A-10 sortie on 31 July 2007 and the final three aircraft left on 15 August 2007, which inactivated the 355th Fighter Squadron after fourteen years at Eielson.

On 24 August 2007 the 18th Fighter Squadron became the 18th Aggressor Squadron, re-roled to fly as the enemy for RED FLAG-Alaska in F-16C/D Block 30s transferred from the 80th Fighter Squadron at Kunsan in early 2008 and painted in foreign-style schemes. Five years later the base was threatened again, by a 2012 Air Force plan to move that squadron to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The Alaska congressional delegation fought it for three years, and on 15 April 2015 the Secretary of the Air Force decided the F-16s would stay.

The reprieve mattered because the F-35 was already in play. Eielson was named preferred alternative on 7 August 2014, and the Record of Decision on 4 April 2016 approved two squadrons — 48 primary assigned aircraft plus 6 backup, 54 in all. The first two F-35As landed on 21 April 2020, the fifty-fourth on 15 April 2022, and the beddown was marked on 13 May 2022 after roughly 500 million dollars of construction. On 2 February 2024 the aggressors changed identity again, becoming the 18th Fighter Interceptor Squadron with an air defence alert mission.

Eielson heats and powers itself. The central heat and power plant is coal-fired, with five generating units brought into service between 1952 and 1987 totalling about 25 MW of nameplate capacity, and it produces steam as well as electricity because at forty below the steam matters more. The Air Force now intends to replace part of that with a microreactor: Eielson is the preferred site for the Department of the Air Force pilot, with Oklo, Inc. selected under a 30-year firm-fixed-price arrangement for a plant of 1–50 MW, subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing.

The cold is the constant. The base’s recorded extremes are −64°F in January 1971 and 93°F in June 1969, a spread of 157 Fahrenheit degrees, and the annual precipitation is under ten inches, which technically makes the place a desert. Ice fog forms over the base in deep cold and closes it. From 1 April 2024 the Air Force approved cold weather assignment incentive pay for Alaskan bases where temperatures fall below −20°F: 2,000 dollars for an unaccompanied airman and 4,000 dollars with dependents, against a twelve-month commitment.

The base’s environmental record is the part the community remembers. Eielson’s 19,790 acres were added to the National Priorities List in November 1989 for petroleum, trichloroethylene, benzene, toluene, xylene and PCB contamination from unlined landfills, sludge trenches and spill areas; roughly 9,000 people drew drinking water from wells within three miles. From 2015 testing for firefighting foam chemicals found PFOA and PFOS above the lifetime health advisory in 150 of 152 drinking water wells at Moose Creek, at 0.01–2.24 parts per billion, and the Air Force supplied bottled water and carbon filters.