I took a risk once early in my career, and had no idea if I would survive

It was 1986, I was a young Captain running the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) radar evaluation program.  This is where my career took a turn, and I took a huge risk.  You come across a time in your life when you are faced with a decision to do what is right or to do what seems to be right for your career.  I had more than one of these choices in my Air Force Career, but this one was remarkable.   There is a difference—take care of your career or do what is right. If you took care of your career you were a courtier, or someone that worked hard at performance decoupage or faking what you did to look good.  The opposite was just doing hard work for the sake of doing what was right, regardless if anyone noticed.   I was responsible for re-writing the policy for all of USAFE on Mode IV.  Mode IV is the transponder on military aircraft that identifies an aircraft as friend or foe-- if foe you are to fire upon them. Somehow, I linked up with Army Air Defenders and they convinced me that they will fire upon any aircraft with a wrong Mode IV response or no response.  I researched this and found out more than 95% of all USAFE aircraft often flew with inoperative Mode IV capabilities.  I was doing my research and coordination and the Army had very strong opinions about this telling me that the fratricide would be a huge element in our ability to conduct a good defensive operation. Meaning, they would shoot down a lot of USAF and Allied Aircraft because in their own data collection, we were horrible at launching aircraft with the proper Mode IV response. That was their job, shoot them down, sort it out later. They had no time to decide if an aircraft was Soviet or US, if the code was bad you fired upon it.  This was a tough issue.  It had a lot of implications as most of the US and allied aircraft were flying with no or bad Mark IV equipment.   In my rewrite of the policy, I was convinced that the US Army Aviation units in Germany had just as much a stake in my policy as anyone else, so decided to change it.   I was invited by the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade conference in Germany to address how Mode IV worked.  Having returned from the 1954Th Radar Evaluation School recently, this was not a hard task, but I did struggle through it as I were addressing pilots and not engineers.  I eventually said “ Mode IV is not a hard thing to get right, but due to the error rates in the encryptors and the short time frames, if the codes would not load right on the first attempt, the Air Forces would press on with the mission”.  There was an audible gasp, as I was addressing over 200 Amy Air Defenders that were told to shoot down any aircraft with a bad Mark IV (Mode 4 ) response.  The next day, Col Ezel, one of the helicopter commanders invited me to a flight along the east German Boarder in an AH-64 Apache.  Mind you I was the only Air Force representative at this Army Conference, and as I learned, the only one for years.  It was not popular for the Air Force to let Army Air Defenders influence their tactics.  Somehow, I slipped through the cracks.  As we flew along the East German border, we were met with Soviet MI-24 Helicopters.  We stopped outside of East German guard towers, and I was told to look through my targeting opticals at the towers and asked on what I saw.  I said there were guards with guns pointed at us, and they said, as you slewed your optics to them, the gun followed so they did the same.  “Welcome to the Cold War”.  We continued and they told me how we were outnumbered, out gunned and out manned.  So, I wrote a most unpopular policy that mandated every aircraft would not set flight unless they had the proper Mark IV (Mode 4) code loaded.  My big day was at the USAF Wing Commanders conference.  I easily coordinated my new policy through my own group because they were ignorant on the consequences of such an action—they were not pilots.   You see our Mark IV load equipment was about 25% successful. Meaning, nearly 75% of scheduled missions would have been cancelled until they successfully had Mark IV codes loaded, and that was a big deal. I was invited to brief this change at the USAFE Wing Commanders Conference.  I was the second briefer after the introduction, which I was told was the second most important issue of the entire two-day conference. I had coordinated my brief through my boss and his boss, and the Army in Europe, and they were overwhelming supportive.  The Army loved it but my own chain of command did not understand it.  No one in my  branch were  pilots.     I briefed the changes in front of every Wing Commander in all of USAFE in 1997, and it was like entering the worst shark tank ever.  Here was a non-pilot telling Wing Commanders of a new policy that would probably ground 75% of their fleet.  The questions came, some very vicious, I had my newfound Army friends in the audience helping me out, but when you piss off all the Wing Commanders in a Theater, it’s tough to win an argument.  I did my best but finally, the USAFE Commander, Gen Donnelly raised his had and said “Enough, this is the new policy, figure it out”. Then I was dismissed.  My boss was not even at the conference. He had no idea what just happened.  I had the entire US Army Aviation community in Europe and one four-star general at my defense.  This could have been the end of my career.  Wing Commander’s yield a lot of power, I remember one saying, “you’re not even a pilot! what gives you the right to suggest such a radical policy?”  I replied, five thousand Army Air Defenders give me that right.  I got back to my desk after my brief. Ten minutes later my Division Chief came to me and said “What the Hell did you just do? We have to go see the Director of Operations right now!”  Mind you I briefed all of this up through the channels, including my director and they all fell asleep.  So I just said, I told the truth, and you approved it.  In the end Maj Gen Rutherford, the deputy Director of Operations wrote in my performance report “I was impressed with Capt. Caldwell’s  Mode IV briefing at the Wing Commanders conference.  His recommendations were timely and will resolve long standing problems.”  My own boss had no idea what I just did, but when you have the entire US Army Aviation Community backing you with the Commander of USAFE and Deputy Director, how can you go wrong?  This is taking a risk without top cover.  To this day I am a member of the Army Aviation Association and will be for life.   I own them and somewhere Col Ezel probably thinks he owes me.