B-1B Bomber Pilot and Dyess AFB Wing Commander to Run for U.S. Congress

The commander of the B-1B wing at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene announced his intentions to run for congress in 2016. Col. Michael Bob Starr, 46, currently the 7th Bomb Wing commander as reported in the Air Force Times said that he has applied for retirement to coincide with the beginning of his campaign for congress.

“I think that they’re going to be able to make that change of command happen before the first of November, in which case I would probably go on terminal leave following that change of command,” Starr is quoted in the Times.

Political speech is severely limited for active duty service members by the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Starr cannot say for what political party he will commence his run for congress.

Congressman Randy Neugebauer, a Republican representing the congressional district that includes Dyess AFB, the 19th Congressional District in Texas, announced his retirement earlier this year.

Starr told the Times that he expects to go on terminal leave around the beginning of November after the planned change of command at Dyess AFB.

Starr is a 1986 graduate of Idabel High School in Oklahoma and a 1992 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After the USAFA, Starr was a student at Harvard in the John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass. He spent a year as a staff officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon before attending Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma. He has more than 2,000 flying hours, 600 of them in combat, and almost all of those hours are as a pilot and instructor pilot in the B-1B Lancer.

Here is Starr when he arrived at Dyess AFB in 2014: