Word: radar
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...victory over Muammar Gaddafi. The Pentagon offered the Navy's demonstration of high-tech firepower as a telling retort to an increasingly restive band of congressional critics who accuse the military of building "gold-plated" weapons that will turn out to be duds in combat. Like Libya's radar transmitters, the Pentagon's detractors were silenced, but only for the moment...
Early action reports from the Gulf of Sidra claimed that half a dozen of Libya's Soviet-made SA-5 missiles had fallen harmlessly into the sea, while the Navy's harm missiles had knocked out a radar station on land. Yet the Libyans were able to replace their radar within a few hours, and there remained some uncertainty whether all four harm (cost: $283,000 each) had actually struck home...
About four hours after the first strike on the Surt missile base, American sensors again detected radar from the site scanning the gulf. Weinberger later said he "would assume" that Soviet technicians helped the Libyans repair the base. American planes launched two more HARM missiles, and again the radar went dead. The final American strike occurred later that morning: a pair of fighter jets hit at least one Libyan vessel near Benghazi...
...hardly a foundation for an effective policy, especially against terrorism. Nor does the battle of Sidra provide much of a guide for retaliation when the source of the threat is not as easy to identify as a speeding patrol boat nor as simple to locate as a beaming radar installation...
...disquieting, an eerie evocation of Apocalypse Now. In Ronald Reagan's two-front muscle flexing last week, the images and the reality were hard to sort out. Power, yes, and the will to use it, yes. But to what end? And with what effect? Will briefly disabling Gaddafi's radar mean less terrorism or more? Will aiding Honduras serve to keep Nicaragua at bay or drag U.S. troops into a thickening morass...