Word: launch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since IFF transponders are impractical for ground forces, aircraft flying close support stay in constant radio contact with forward air controllers, whose job it is to track the shifting battle lines and point out enemy targets. Before an attack plane can launch its missiles at a Iraqi tank, an FAC must identify the target, declare that particular plane "hot" and switch on the targeting authority on the plane's computer. "The complexity is that you've got human beings in the chain," says Army spokesman Major Peter Keating. "And at night, when everybody's moving and talking on the radio...
...ages, from the sack of Rome to the Nazi Holocaust. This century's military technology has given new power to those primordial fears and illusions, wrote Friedrich in his book. Thus the most chilling uncertainty of the gulf war is whether Saddam, in an act of cynical desperation, might launch a few surviving Scuds armed with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads...
Saddam's vanished air force may reappear. His best planes -- MiG-29s and F-1 Mirages -- and his French-trained pilots have fled to Iran. But at least 350 others, mostly older MiGs, remain in Iraq in revetments and shelters. He could launch these, armed with conventional or chemical bombs, against the allied ground forces. He might even send some of them on kamikaze-style, one-way missions into Saudi Arabia and Israel. "Saddam appears prepared to lose those aircraft in strikes against us," warns a Pentagon general...
General Schwarzkopf promises to stick with the air blitzkrieg until it has achieved its objective. But the pressure to launch the ground attack will soon increase. Says Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, University of London: "The allies won't leave it too long into February because they need to get ((the war)) over during March...
...next few weeks. One of the top-priority U.S. targets is the Republican Guards, Saddam's crack troops, who form a mobile reserve to be thrown into the eventual land battle for Kuwait at the most critical points. A high British officer says the allies will not launch the climactic ground offensive until at least 30%, and preferably 50%, of the Guards' fighting power is destroyed from the air. But how will they know when that point is reached? Washington officials admit they are having trouble gauging how much damage bombing is doing to the widely dispersed and well...