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Hanoi's inventory after 1968. A supersonic, heavily
armed interceptor, it was highly maneuverable
and a potent threat to the bomb-laden u.s. fighter
bombers.
(8//80 As the DRV's air defense system
expanded, elements of it crept southward
towards South Vietnam and Laos. A New
Weapons Control Center that had been set up at
Cam Xuyen C1816N 1060lE) was detected by SIG­
INT in late 1970. Missile units were observed
redeploying to the panhandle of North Vietnam.
An outstation of the main air operations net near
the Laotian border became active about the same
time. All of these moves suggested an aggressive
stance towards American air operations near the
border of the DRV and southern Laos. 117
Increasingly, by late 1971 SAlVI and AAA units
tracked and fired at American reconnaissance aircraft
flying over the portion of the Ho Chi Minh
trail in the panhandle of Laos. Between
November 1971 and January 1972, there were
almost sixty MiG intrusions into Laotian airspace.
American and Vietnamese aircraft clashed
several times in early 1972 with five Vietnamese
and one American aircraft shot down.
CU) After Rolling Thunder, the USAF looked
at the lessons of the air campaign and decided
that technical solutions were needed to fix the
problem of the successful MiG attacks. This track
was taken despite an Air Force Weapons Systems
Group study that concluded that, even with all of
the detection systems like the QRC-248 and Rivet
Top that effectively delivered warnings to U.S.
airmen, losses to MiGs had soared at the end of
Rolling Thunder. The Air Force improved its airto-air
missiles and added new airborne radar
warning systems such as Combat Tree. However,
in terms of training and philosophy, the air commands
and weapons schools deemphasized airto-air
training in favor of ground attacks. Even
the Air Force's clumsy tactical air combat formations
were not changed. 118
CU) On the other hand, the U.S. Navy, while
adding new technical upgrades such as the
upgraded Phantom variant, the F-4J, opted for a
complete change in tactics and training. This attitude
originated with a document known as the
Ault Report, which asserted that U.S. naval aviators
had lost their air-to-air combat skills and
that, for example, problems like the poor missileto-hit
ratio in early 1968 was attributable to inadequate
pilot skills. The solution that the Navy
adopted was to open the Navy Fighter Weapons
School - known more popularly as Top Gun - at
Miramar Naval Air Station, California. There
training concentrated totally on dogfighting skills
- F-4 pilots trained against aircraft with MiG-like
flight characteristics. Graduates from Top Gun
would then return to the fleet and train other air
crews. More importantly, and often overlooked,
was that Navy GCI operators trained with their
pilots. The crucial factor for the Navy's later high
performance against the North Vietnamese was
the working familiarity between the carrier pilots
and their GCI operators.l'"
fS1 The air war would soon restart. On 31
March 1972, under the cover of early spring drizzle
and fog, three PAVN divisions, supported by
tanks and heavy artillery, crossed the DMZ and
hit the two ARVN divisions stationed in Military
Region I with a whirlwind of steel, This was the
beginning of the communist Easter offensive. The
attacks had been expected by Allied intelligence;
however, the move across the DMZ was a complete
surprise, something that most Allied commanders
believed that Hanoi would avoid so as to
not give Washington an excuse to resume bombing
in the North.120
(8//81) As for SIGINT, NSA reporting from
late .January up to the date of the assault, indicated
that there were major concentrations of regular
North Vietnamese units near the DMZ, in the
Central Highlands in Kontum Province, and in
the Cambodian border region in Tay Ninh
Province. Reports from late March indicated that
PAVN artillery units were positioned near cities
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