The U.S. military’s battle plan for Iraq began as “a what-if session over beers among a handful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago,” the National Journal reports in a must-read article. They were all students at the Army’s School for Advanced Military Studies, known colloquially as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army’s […]
March 2003
For the first time in Gulf War II, the U.S. Air Force has hit downtown Baghdad with “bunker busting” bombs. A B-2 stealth bomber dropped two of the 4,700-pound, satellite-guided GBU-28 munitions on a major communications tower on the east bank of Tigris River, according to Ha’Aretz. The bunker-busters were parts of massive coalition bombing […]
Just because they’re called “unmanned aerial vehicles” doesn’t mean they don’t have a crew. StrategyPage looks at the assignments for the three-person team assigned to operate the Predator drone.
The Iraqi troops claim to have shot down and captured a British Army Phoenix drone near Basra, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly. The truck-launched, 5.5 meter wide Phoenix unmanned planes have been used for nearly five years as reconnaissance planes; they put in over 2,000 hours of flights over Kosovo. But in Gulf War II, […]
Nature accomplished earlier this week what Iraq’s Republican Guard could not: Blinding sandstorms paralyzed the American air campaign, grounding helicopters and cutting bombing runs by as much as 85 percent in some areas. But there’s an Air Force program in the works that may enable pilots to plow through just about any foe — even […]
