Word: bridgehead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Iraqis might have moved more rapidly if they were not concerned that the Iranian bridgehead at Fao was a feint to draw off troops from Basra, Iraq's second largest city. Across the nearby border, Iran has amassed 200,000 soldiers. To have the city cut off would be a stunning and perhaps fatal blow to the Baghdad government. As the battle at Fao raged, Iraqi fighters shot down an Iranian plane on a flight from Tehran to Ahvaz. All 46 aboard, including eight members of Iran's parliament, perished...
Suddenly, a bridgehead became a blitzkrieg last week in the embattled Falkland Islands. Members of Britain's Parachute Regiment moved rapidly out of their hard-won corner of East Falkland near the settlement of Port San Carlos, taken by invasion only a week earlier, and descended 20 miles south near the settlement of Darwin. Using helicopters to hop across the boggy ground, the crack British troops confronted an Argentine garrison once estimated at about 600. There were reports of sharp fighting, and then the British Defense Ministry tersely announced that Her Majesty's troops had captured both Darwin...
...days before the offensive began, the Argentine air force had done its determined best to keep the British penned up in their expanding bridgehead. As the Port San Carlos landing area grew from a toehold on a rocky shore into a substantial area, Argentine pilots flew sortie after sortie against the warships and supply vessels that moved through narrow Falkland Sound, and the results at times were devastating for Britain's warships. As they have all along, the claims from London and Buenos Aires varied greatly about the course of the spectacular war of attrition offshore. Britain reported the loss...
...watching the boats slice through the kelp; helicopters panic the ducks; mines are planted far out near the gorse and heather. This is what war does to a landscape. The place that was a few weeks ago a vast serenity with marvelously fresh air is now "a major bridgehead," home to Scorpion light tanks and Rapier surface-to-air missiles and all the other accouterments of the most advanced mayhem...
Trying to retake the Falklands, the British task force needed three kinds of warplanes: a naval interceptor to protect the fleet, a ground-attack aircraft to soften up enemy defenses on the islands, and an agile troop-support plane to cover British forces as they advance from their bridgehead toward the main Argentine garrison at Port Stanley. All those roles have been filled by what the British regard as their magnificent flying machine: the Sea Harrier, a vertical short-takeoff and landing jet whose maneuverability and advanced avionics have made it more than a match for the land-based attack...