Whiteman Air Force Base (IATA: SZL, ICAO: KSZL, FAA LID: SZL) is a United States Air Force base located just south of Knob Noster, Missouri, United States.

In May 1942, construction workers began building a railroad spur for the new air base in an area known to locals as the "Blue Flats" because of the color of the soil.

[5] On 3 December 1955, the base was renamed Whiteman Air Force Base in honor of 2nd Lieutenant George A. Whiteman, an Army Air Corps pilot who was killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while attempting to take off from Bellows Field.

Whiteman was born in Longwood, Missouri, and graduated from Smith-Cotton High School in Sedalia, less than 20 miles from the base that would bear his name.

At the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the new Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a drawdown of nuclear arms via two treaties: the INF Treaty and START I.

This would lead to the eventual phase-out of the Minuteman II systems at Whiteman, and put the future of the base in question.

Congressman representing Missouri's 4th district, announced that Whiteman AFB would be the home of the USAF's new Advanced Technology Bomber, which would eventually be called the B-2 Spirit.

[8] On 30 November 1988, SAC announced that the 509th Bomb Wing would divest its FB-111 and KC-135 aircraft, relocate from its then-home station of Pease AFB, New Hampshire which was being realigned as an Air National Guard base pursuant to BRAC, and become the nation's first operational B-2 bomber unit.