The 16th Air Expeditionary Task Force (16 AETF) is a provisional United States Air Force unit assigned to the United States Air Forces in Europe. It was last activated at Izmir Air Base, Turkey on 1 December 2006, and inactivated on 30 April 2008.
The 16 AETF may be activated or inactivated at any time.
Formerly designated as Sixteenth Air Force, the command was the first newly established Numbered Air Force (NAF) by the USAF after World War II, It was activated in 1954 as a Joint Military Group to provide command and control of USAF activities in Spain, being designated a NAF in 1956. In 1957 16th AF was realigned under Strategic Air Command to provide command and control of SAC bases and B-47 Stratojet rotational units assigned and deployed to Spain and Morocco.
In 1966 after SAC withdrew its forces from Europe, 16th AF became part of the United States Air Forces in Europe, providing command and control of USAFE forces initially in Spain and North Africa, and later in Italy and Turkey until 2006. It later became a provisional Air Expeditionary Task Force under USAFE as part of the Global War on Terrorism.
Famous quotes containing the words air, task and/or force:
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The task he undertakes
Is numbering sands and drinking oceans dry.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.
The farm I made my home on in the mountains
I had to take by force rather than buy.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)