spartans_in_darkness

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to any shortcomings in Hammock; the North
Vietnamese MiGs had been in a stand-down since
the summer of 1965 after a series of disastrous air
engagements against the Americans. But the
nature and tempo of the air war changed dramatically
in the spring of 1966.
(U) In April 1966, Washington realized that
the Rolling Thunder campaign, to that point, had
been ineffective in halting the supply of the southern
communists and had failed to convince
Hanoi's leadership to end its support. The White
House decided to change the emphasis of the
campaign and go after the DRV's petroleum, oil,
and lubricant (POL) capacity, especially its storage
sites. The planners at the Pentagon projected
that this assault would cause the North's supply
effort to grind to halt as it ran out of fuel. The
importance of the POL targets brought the MiGs
out in greater numbers to defend the fuel dumps.
After initial clashes in April, in which the U.S.
came away the clear winner, Hanoi again pulled
its MiGs out of the war. From April to December
1966, the Air Force shot down seventeen North
Vietnamese MiGs, but how much of a role
Hammock had in any of these engagements is
unknown.
(U) In late 1966, the MiG threat returned as
North Vietnamese pilots engaged Americans during
their bombing runs. The American response
to the MiG attacks was hampered by two considerations,
both drawn from the limits imposed on
operations by the Johnson administration: MiGs
could fly across the border into Chinese airspace
to avoid pursuit, and the five principal MiG airfields
of Phuc Yen, Kep, Gia Lam, Kien An, and
Cat Bi were off-limits to ground strikes by
American aircraft. (This latter limit would be
removed in April 1967, but the returns would be
meager. The North Vietnamese minimized their
MiG losses through a combination of redeployment
to airfields in Communist China, dispersal
among the five combat airfields in the North, and
a concentration of AAA and SAMdefenses at each
base.) To get around these restrictions, the USAF
came up with a plan to lure out the MiGs, especially
the dangerous MiG-21s, ambush them, and
destroy them in detail. The plan was called Bolo,
and SIGINT was very much a player in the operation.
(U) Setting the Trap:
Operation Bolo, January 1967
(U) The philosophy behind Operation Bolo
was as simple as the first premise in judo: utilize
the enemy's strength against himself. For the
Bolo planners, an understanding of the North
Vietnamese air surveillance system, and the
means whereby intelligence was fed into it, was
the key to making the operation work. North
Vietnamese signals intelligence was able to identify
the type of American aircraft involved in
strike operations based on the profile of its emitters,
in this case, aircraft callsigns, procedural
chatter, and the ECM emissions from specific aircraft
jamming pods. Knowing the aircraft profile
of the strike formations, the controllers then vectored
MiGs against the fighter bombers, principally
the F-105s, which were considered vulnerable
to the high-speed MiG-21s. Vietnamese pilots
had come to respect the capabilities of the
Phantom and often avoided them except for quick
hit-and-run strikes.
(U) The commander 7th Air Force tasked the
skipper of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW),
Colonel Robin Olds, to come up with a plan to
neutralize the MiG threat. Olds' main problem
was how to lure the North Vietnamese MiGs up
into the air in numbers enough to make a large
combat effort worthwhile. MiG combat tactics
and reactions to American air strikes were often
unpredictable.53 He hit upon the idea of presenting
Hanoi with a juicy target - a seemingly large
flight of bomb-laden F-105s. However, they were
not to be the Thunderchiefs. Rather, the flights
were to be made up of Phantoms mimicking the
fighter-bomber electronic profile.
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