The Focus Is Fighting Tonight For New Air Mobility Boss
Oct. 3, 2024 | By David Roza
A few months after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Capt. John D. Lamontagne was a C-17 pilot at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C., where he and his fellow Moose drivers started flying with night vision goggles to prepare for blacked-out landings in the Middle East in the new Global War on Terror.
“At the time, night vision goggles were a mission set for our most experienced crew members,” Lamontagne, now a four-star general and the new head of Air Mobility Command told Air & Space Forces Magazine 23 years later. “9/11 basically drove the whole team at Charleston, and then I’d say probably across Air Mobility Command, to be qualified on NVGs … it didn’t turn night into day, but it was very much a key enabler to do what we needed to do at a lower level of risk.”
So when Lamontagne’s squadron commander asked if he’d be interested in flying a special operations team to Kandahar in the early months of the war, Lamontagne said he was ready to go. But since he was working directly for the wing commander at the time, he had to get the colonel’s permission first.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-mobility-command-lamontagne/
