A civilian who’s at home challenging Nellis pilots

By Richard A. Serrano

Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009 | 2 a.m.

She wears no stars or bars, no uniform, no pilot’s wings. She does not salute and she does not return salutes. But draped over Yvonne Gresnick’s office chair at Nellis Air Force Base is one sharp piece of evidence of whom she serves — a desert camouflage, bullet-proof vest, the kind worn in war.

“It’s a reminder for me of what our troops do every day,” she said.

Gresnick is the vice director of the 98th Range Wing. She maintains nearly 3 million acres of rough mountain and desert terrain sprawling north of Nellis, pockmarked with 1,400 bombing targets and simulated live artillery fire. She also oversees 12,000 square miles of air space where Air Force pilots fly practice runs over her range.

She sets up the shooting gallery and lets the pilots have at it — 44,000 practice sorties a year.

She is the first-ever civilian vice director at Nellis, and the senior ranking civilian on the base. And she came about her career in an unlikely fashion, after meeting and marrying her husband, Russell Smith. He went on to a 24-year military career in the Air Force, retiring a decade ago at the rank of captain.

Gresnick, armed with a bachelor’s and master’s in science and management, “figured out very quickly” that she wanted to join her husband but with her own career.

So in October 1981 she went to work at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. She began as a contract data manager, studying designs of engines and fuel tanks on the F-15. When he was transferred to Spain, she went with him as a contract specialist. When he was moved to Nellis, she came along as contracting officer. In November 2001 she became civilian vice director of the Range Wing.

Sometimes the transfers meant less pay and less responsibility. For four years in the late 1980s she stayed home with their small daughter and son. But she returned to a civilian career with the Air Force and stuck with it.

Danny Douglass, civilian deputy director of the 98th Operations Support Squadron, who unlike her is retired military, said she is well-respected despite her status. “You can shut the door and vent, and she listens. She gets a new (military) boss every two years, whether she likes it or not, and she still likes the challenges.”

Gresnick does not feel awkward in a world of uniforms and brass. Nor, she said, is she unnerved by the outside experts and defense contractors who help run the radar scans. Even as the daughter of a Navy veteran of World War II, she has no regrets about going the civilian route. “I really, really didn’t consider it,” she said of enlisting. At 53 and a top civilian, “I can control my own destiny.”

That destiny began on Oct. 13, 1981, when she landed a desk job at Wright-Patterson. She remembers her first day. “I went to work in an environment still full of pilots from Vietnam.” They were older by then, she said, “and we called them the gray-haired and wrinkled guys.”

Also around that time, new Air Force studies showed that most American pilots who were shot down over Vietnam were hit on their first eight or 10 missions, vulnerable for their lack of experience. Thus was born the idea for pilots to be more authentically prepared for war by flying in simulated live-fire exercises — computer-generated salvos that would “tag” them. The testing range at Nellis, the Air Force’s primary combat-training base, was developed to accommodate the training.

Working with air combat specialists and helping direct construction crews, Gresnick sets up fabricated villages, tank lines, artillery batteries — anything the pilots would find in a run over a real enemy site such as Afghanistan. She often mixes it up with obstacles as difficult as live-time war.

The fake villages might include a grand mosque and a nightclub, a prayer tower and a palace. For good measure she will add a power plant with weapons of mass destruction. There might be a Dog Bone Lake and an interstate rolling nearby. Sometimes helicopters drop in and out; other times Marines scamper around.

“I throw as much as I possibly can at them,” she said.

As a civilian, she does not fly the jets. Nor is she on the ground pretending to knock them out of the sky. But every now and then she gets out of the office and watches the jets. “I can sit in my car and watch my own personal air show,” she said.