Ellsworth Air Force Base: Cold War Shield on the Plains

A few miles northeast of Rapid City, just off Interstate Ninety, sits Ellsworth Air Force Base, one of the most strategically significant military installations in the United States for the better part of the twentieth century, and still an active B-twenty-one Raider base today.

The airfield's origins trace to nineteen forty-one, when the Army Air Corps established Rapid City Army Air Base to train heavy bomber crews for World War Two. After the war it was nearly closed. What saved it was the Cold War and geography. The Black Hills sit deep in the continental interior, which made aircraft stationed here capable of reaching Soviet targets via polar routes in roughly the same time it would take missiles from either coast.

The base was renamed in nineteen fifty-three for Brigadier General Richard Ellsworth, a decorated World War Two pilot who died that year when his B-thirty-six Peacemaker crashed in Newfoundland during a routine navigation mission. Ellsworth became a key installation in the Strategic Air Command, the command structure General Curtis LeMay built to hold the nuclear deterrent. At its Cold War peak, the base housed dozens of B-fifty-two Stratofortresses on continuous alert posture, meaning fueled, loaded, and ready to launch within minutes of a presidential order.

The economic relationship between Ellsworth and Rapid City has been enormous for generations. Base personnel and civilian contractors have consistently represented one of the largest single employers in western South Dakota. When the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure process in two thousand five recommended closing Ellsworth, the reaction in Rapid City was something close to panic. South Dakota's congressional delegation mounted one of the most aggressive base-retention campaigns in BRAC history. Ellsworth survived. Today it hosts the B-twenty-one Raider, Northrop Grumman's newest stealth bomber, in its first operational deployment.