Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force
military unit
Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force (4 ATAF) was a NATO military formation under Allied Air Forces Central Europe tasked with providing air support to NATO's Central Army Group (CENTAG) in the southern portion of West Germany. 4 ATAF commanded all flying units based within its sector and all reinforcements flying into its sector, as well as ground-based radar systems and stations, air defense units and the airfields in its sector.
History
Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force was formed in 1951 with its area of responsibility covering Germany south of the city of Kassel. Commander of Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force at its inception was the commanding Major General of the American Twelfth Air Force based in the southwest of Germany. After Twelfth Air Force returned to the continental United States in 1958, the commander of Seventeenth Air Force took over command of Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force.
Headquarters 4 ATAF moved several times over more than forty years. Established about 1951 at Trier Air Base, the headquarters was moved to Ramstein Air Base in November 1957 where it remained until December 1980 when it was moved to Heidelberg where it was colocated with Headquarters Central Army Group. An operational Air Defence Operations Centre was operated at Ouvrage Molvange from 1961 until 1967 when it was moved to a USAF site in Kindsbach just south of Ramstein Air Base. The headquarters also operated a number of communications sites which were concerned with secure communications for the release of tactical nuclear weapons through the NATO Quick Reaction Alert Force. In 1985 NATO began with the construction of a new Static War Headquarters bunker in Ruppertsweiler, Germany.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.