Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

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however, were not really comparable. Air-to-air combat over North Korea
was more like that which took place over Europe in 1944 than that which
developed over North Vietnam. In Korea, the opposing fighters
approached each other at higher speeds than fighters had in World War 11,
and air-to-air encounters were completed in shorter time, but the aircraft
themselves were easier to control. That is, trained, experienced pilots from
World War I1 could transfer their skills from piston-engine fighters to jets.
Moreover, the enemy in Korea had only one means of really challenging
the United States in the air; it was the MiG or nothing. Finally, in Korea,
enemy aircraft had to come to the U.S. fighters, and Chinese and North
Korean pilots had to try to develop means to compensate for their inexperience
with numbers.
These factors did not apply over North Vietnam. There, the conflict
was between two systems, one of which was hampered by politically motivated
constraints. In North Vietnam, the Vietnamese constructed a multifaceted,
mutually supporting system of air defense. The burden was on
U.S. forces to penetrate it because they were never allowed to totally
destroy it. When U.S. aircraft nullified one facet of the North Vietnamese
defenses, the enemy system emphasized or developed another. Together,
the MiGs, SAMs, guns, and radars were a formidable barrier. The duty of
U.S. air units was to penetrate that barrier. Vietnam was not a conflict of
fighter-on-fighter but of offensive systems against defensive systems. The
measure of the success of the U.S. system was not the ratio of friendly to
enemy planes lost, but whether the U.S. forces could achieve the goals set
for them by the U.S. government-or in crude terms, whether the U.S.
could afford the extravagance of waging an air war of attrition for four
years under circumstances that were essentially self-defeating. Measured
in these terms, the air superiority campaign was clearly successful.
In Vietnam, the USAF did not begin with a large cadre of veteran
fighter pilots, as it had in Korea. More importantly, the use of SAMs in
great numbers meant that previous air combat experience might actually be
detrimental. Finally, the fighter and fighter-bomber missions were combined;
indeed, the major improvements made to the F-4C (to produce the
FAD) were designed to improve the FA’S performance as a bomber.’Ih In
Korea, USAF F-86s had served as a barrier behind which an interdiction
campaign took place. Over North Vietnam, U.S. forces had to fight their
way through a variety of defenses to conduct interdiction bombing. In
many instances, F-4s had MiG cover and interdiction responsibilities
simultaneously. This is not to say that USAF pilots were adequately trained
for air-to-air combat with missile-firing MiGs during LINEBACKER. Even
the USAF’s own air combat study, conducted in 1973, concluded that they
were not.l17 The important point is that air-to-air combat with MiGs was
never the primary mission of the majority of F-4 pilots. In terms of survival
and mission performance, it was more important that they be able to avoid
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