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JEAN BELLAMY WIPED A BEAD of sweat from her brow as she gave the all clear for the 15th consecutive F35 to take off. She was the on-duty air traffic controller at the Air Force base in Misawa, Japan when the order came in to get 20 fully loaded F35’s in the air immediately. The past few days had been tense keeping the base at DEFCON 3, which meant they had to be ready at all times to mobilize within 15 minutes. All the bases in the area stood ready on this alert, some of which were also launching planes. The call that just came in raised them to DEFCON 2 which shortened the readiness time to 6 minutes. That would have been stressful on its own but the order to load and launch 20 planes immediately was testing her resolve.
The F35s were the latest stealth planes in the U.S. arsenal and
