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Air Force took sustained, persistent, and aggressive steps to mitigate their impacts.
Simultaneously, the Shoshone and Paiute tribes living on the Duck Valley reservation contested
use of the airspace for ETI training above their reservation. As Senator Inouye put their dilemma
most graphically nearly six years later, "I've received literally dozens of letters from affected
tribes telling me that in the midst of their religious ceremonies they have to hit the ground
because the planes are flying so low and the sonic boom was so bad" (IWP 1998d, 6).
As NEPA requires, however, the Air Force had conducted an environmental assessment
(EA) in 1992 analyzing the impact of the addition of a composite wing at Mountain Home to see
if a full-scale environmental impact statement (EIS) was needed. But instead of assessing the
cumulative impact of the addition of the composite wing, the base's ongoing activities, and the
ETI, the Air Force said it was only willing to do a separate EA for the ETI only. Known as
"piecemealing" of environmental studies, this tactic (i.e., treating interrelated activities as
separate for EA and EIS purposes to camouflage the overall negative impacts of Air Force
operations) to limit the transparency of its decisions and operations was commonplace by the
1990s. Conversely, had the Air Force moved initially toward a cumulative EA and, later, EIS,
this would have been a true indicator that organizational change was occurring within the Air
Force.
Piecemealed, in the process, was the "audience" paying attention to these decisions,
wanting to participate in them, and holding the military accountable to ENR laws. Indeed, an
earlier Air Force report warned that a joint EIS on the composite wing and the training range
would produce environmental objections that could seriously delay the projects (IWP 1994a).
Ultimately, a federal court magistrate agreed that the composite wing and the training
range were "inextricably intertwined," and that the Air Force had disingenuously used the bed-
down of the composite wing at Mountain Home to justify what it had always wanted to do (viz.,
Convention