Air Force AC&W radar squadrons, beginning around 1959-1960, were tasked to provide long-range radar coverage for the Army�s Nike Missile air-defense system around major U.S. cities, industrial centers, and certain SAC bomber bases and BMEWS radar sites. Some of these joint Air Force - Army radar sites involved existing Air Force Stations, while others involved new joint-use sites to which an existing Air Force AC&W radar squadron was relocated or a new squadron was activated. While both services would have preferred to maintain separate radar facilities, funding crunches and Congressional mandates forced the Army and the Air Force (and, in certain cases, the Navy and the FAA) to combine assets.

As with Air Force radar operations, early Nike missile command-and-control functions (at facilities termed "Army Air-Defense Command Posts," or AADCP's) were manual operations, using plexiglass plotting boards and telephonic inputs. Computerized command-and-control operations began in the late 1950�s with the AN/FSG-1 �Missile Master� computer system. Initially, the Army system was separate from the Air Force system, but was soon integrated into the Air Force / NORAD Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system. There were ten (10) Army Missile-Master control centers total across the Lower 48; technically, these facilities were termed �NORAD Joint Manual Direction Centers.� Air Force operations personnel were also assigned to these Army direction centers, and conversely Army operators were also assigned to SAGE direction centers.

Less-complex (and less-capable) Nike missile command-and-control operations were established at others locations. A number of Missile-Master facilities also were subsequently converted to one of these less-complex systems. The other Nike missile command-and-control systems were knows as "Battery Integrated Radar Display Equipment" (BIRDIE), using an AN/GSG-5(V) computer system; "Missile Mentor," using an AN/TSQ-51 solid-state computer system; and "Missile Monitor" or "Missile Minder," using an AN/TSQ-38 solid-state computer system (Key West only).

The following table lists the joint-use Air Force radar stations along with a summary of the Army Nike missile system that was supported, and other information as available. For more-extensive information on the Nike Missile defense system, refer to Rings of Supersonic Steel (2nd Edition) by Mark Berhow & Mark Morgan, and/or go to various on-line sources such as Ed Thelen's informative web site, http://ed-thelen.org/.