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During the first gulf war and at the time Kuwait had purchased F/A-18's, even before the air war began, the Untied States was training Kuwait pilots at NAS Lemoore. I was a supervisor responsible for the F/A-18 flight simulators and weapons trainers on base. Our staff of training device operators (PTT, OFT, WTT's)were mostly women who assisted the flight instructor. We had to make extraordinary effort to have only male staff operate the simulators when Navy and contract flight instructors had Kuwait students in the training cockpits. It was a pain in the butt, because we had to accomidate this crap because of muslim sensibilities. Often I had to fill in because we did not have enough male staff.

We were briefed by the State Department during this cluster freak and were informed of a Saudi pilot that ejected out of an F-15 because he ran it out of fuel. He ran it out of fuel because he refused to land based upon receiving landing clearance from a women in the tower. He refused to take orders or direction from a women. The Air Force airmen were all women in the tower at the time. Sounds crazy but we were told that this was true. Even at NAS Lemoore we learned that they were sure to have male petty officers in the tower when the Kuwait pilots were in the air. Our government at the time even provided the Kuwait pilots with Marine Corps A-4's because that is all they knew how to fly and needed some flight time before their first Hornet flights. These came from the last frontline Marine Corps A4-E/F operating squadrons in 1990-1 who had to give up their aircraft for the Kuwait pilots. You would not hear this from other sources, but at the time all the pilots I knew thought this was utter bullshit.

“We had to make extraordinary effort to have only male staff operate the simulators when Navy and contract flight instructors had Kuwait students in the training cockpits.”

That is a clear violation of the LOA. To have our Navy cave on the women issue means the Navy was violating the LOA, not the customer.

Indeed, the country must sign the LOA and in the LOA is specific and clear language stating they have to accept whoever we assign to the program, be it women or homosexual. I’ve been in meetings in the US and the host country where US women were running finance, delivery schedules and IMET programs. The muslims accepted that as the way it had to be.

I’ve been associated with FMS programs since before Gulf War I, well before, and that clause in the LOA goes back decades.