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...order reached the warships stationed in the waters off Iraq at 2:30 a.m. local time Thursday. Onboard the U.S.S. Constellation, Navy Prowlers, charged with jamming the enemy's air-defense and communications systems, were told to take off for Baghdad within the hour. Two F-117s based in Qatar followed behind them, reaching the skies above Iraq's capital before dawn broke. "It was fairly quiet," says the pilot of a Prowler aircraft, who asked to be identified by his handle, Dutch. "There wasn't a lot going...
...time. Now virtually the entire armada of U.S. warplanes can dispatch such weapons. For the first time ever, a war can begin with one side able to wipe out, with near impunity, every key enemy building and other fixed target its intelligence has identified. Instead of F-117s buzzing Baghdad with a measly pair of 2,000-lb. laser-guided bombs, as in the 1991 war, the next conflict might start with B-2s over Iraq, each dropping 16 of the 2,000-lb. JDAMs. They would probably be followed by B-1s, each capable of dropping 24 JDAMs...
American officers also grouse that they sometimes have to use smaller bombs than usual to reduce the blast area. "About 1 of every 5 bombs we dropped last night from F-117s were 500-pounders," grumbled a colonel, "and not the 2,000-pounders we have always used." Smaller bombs mean there's less certainty about destroying the target in one attack. And if the pilot has to come back, that increases the risk to him in order to lessen the risk to civilians on the ground--a kind of Disneyland idea of customer service that rankles many war fighters...
...safe for unstealthy planes until Iraq's antiaircraft-missile batteries are destroyed. That assignment is in the hands of electronic-warfare planes like the Air Force's EF-111 Ravens and F-16CJs and the Navy's EA-6B Prowlers, which will fly in behind the F-117s. Their jammers blank out ground-based radar and computer screens, and some of them let fly with HARM missiles, which home in on and destroy radar installations, leaving antiaircraft missiles at the site blind and useless...
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