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Scenario for Aerial Combat
Betting it all in the ultimate gamble where there is only one winner. Lou Drendel continues his exhilarating account of how air combat is fought and won.
The aerial campaigns against North Vietnam were from the outset of the war conceived as exercises designed to interdict the flow of men and material into South Vietnam or to discourage the enemy from continuing his sponsorship of war by destroying his industrial capacity to wage war. The political grounds upon which this policy was built were not concrete enough to allow the use of the maximum force available and, as a consequence, the results of the campaign were often less than completely satisfactory.
High-level policy often restricted not only the list of targets that could be struck to achieve the objectives of the campaign, but in many cases, the time frame in which these targets could be struck. Faced with such crippling restrictions, military planners were forced to tactics which they did not consider ideal. One example of this was the manner in which they dealt with the North Vietnamese Air Force early in the war. Since it was so important that they put the maximum effort on each target, they loaded the F-4’s, which would normally accompany the F-105 bombers as fighter escort, with bombs. Early in the war this was a feasible policy, since the MIG threat was relatively low. But as the North Vietnamese radar system improved, and the MIG 17 force was bolstered by the addition of MIG-21’s, it became necessary to designate a certain portion of the F-4 strike force as MIG CAP.
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