Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...technology, in the form of the Aegis system. It is designed to enable a single vessel to protect an entire Navy battle group from all sorts of attack. The Vincennes is one of eleven U.S. cruisers equipped with the system, and the first to be deployed in the Persian Gulf. Phased-array radars constantly sweep the skies over a vast swatch of ocean. They can track more than 100 aircraft, surface ships, submarines, missiles and torpedoes simultaneously. All show up as white symbols on one of four blue screens; each symbol is in a particular shape, identifying the object...
...Iranian side, both civilian and military jets take off from Bandar Abbas airport. Military traffic controllers keep close watch on ship movements in the gulf; they must have known that the Vincennes was engaged in a gun battle with Iranian speedboats (two were eventually sunk) only twelve miles offshore at the southern end of the gulf at the very moment that Flight 655 took off. Yet apparently nobody warned the civilian traffic controllers that Flight 655's path would take it directly over a developing firefight; had the controllers known that, they say, they would have delayed the takeoff...
...then, can the Aegis system or its operators tell what kind of aircraft they are tracking? One method is flight pattern. Although the Pentagon at first asserted that the Airbus was outside the normal pathway for airline flights over the gulf, it has since conceded that the plane stayed within the 20-mi.-wide corridor all the time. The Pentagon claimed, however, that the pilot had wandered toward the western edge of the corridor and corrected that by veering back east toward the center line. As fate would have it, that turn headed the plane in the direction...
...sunk by a missile delivered from a plane that no one on board ever sees. In the open ocean, a possibly hostile plane can be tracked over hundreds of miles. But Admiral William Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has likened combat in the Persian Gulf -- only about 25 miles wide at the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes or even seconds after it first appears on a radar screen; a captain who hesitates too long while trying to identify...
Since then, the U.S. has promulgated new, hair-trigger "rules of engagement" for the gulf. They specify that commanders need not wait until their forces are fired upon before unloosing their own weapons. All they need is some convincing indication that a ship or plane is approaching with hostile intent. Doubtless influencing Rogers' decision was the fact that his ship had just been engaged in hostilities. Following reports of Iranian speedboat attacks on two neutral ships, the Vincennes sent a helicopter to investigate. The Iranians fired on the helicopter, triggering a firefight that Flight 655 had the foul luck...