Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

any event, neither worked out very well. Clark actually ordered his subordinate
commanders to attack Russian soldiers at Pristina airport. Fortunately, the senior
British officer, General Sir Mike Jackson, refused point-blank. In fact, he replied,
“I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.”
Out of the 120-something kills claimed on Serbian armor, we could only find a
dozen vehicles destroyed. We did find a lot of destroyed decoys—plywood tanks
with little kerosene stoves inside to provide heat signatures, or old World War II
relics without treads. The Yugoslavs simply lit fires under the bellies to heat up the
metal so we’d see them with our infrared systems.
After the war, a battle-damage assessment team was told to go back in and
“find” the correct number of wrecked tanks. The Air Force major in charge of the
team came back with twelve confirmed tank kills and refused to inflate the
numbers to help Clark’s entry into politics. This didn’t do the major’s career any
good, so he transferred to the National Guard. Guys like that get a scotch from me
on sight.
As time rolled on, the Vietnam-era pilots eventually retired, and most of us
who’d fought the First Gulf War slowly staggered up the ladder. We became flight
leads, instructor pilots, and commanders. A very few of us became Weapons and
Tactics Officers. We’d spent the years between the wars over Iraq occasionally
getting shot at, working out system limitations, and deriving tactics. There were
tireless efforts by many talented guys to improve our systems and weapons.
For the F-16CJ, the HARM Targeting System (HTS), thankfully, evolved into
something that had less and less to do with lobbing anti-radiation missiles and more
to do with precision-targeting. HTS was initially fairly inaccurate, since the HARM
didn’t require a very tight firing solution. The missile was supposed to “see” the
radar signal, called a “beam,” and follow that beam back to impact. Think of
standing in a dark room with a pistol and shooting at pulsating flashlight beams, and
you get the idea. However, shooting at the beam doesn’t mean you have much of a
chance of hitting the source. You might scare it though, and force it to turn off.
That’s okay for the moment, but the flashlight is still alive and may get you another
time.
So, lobbing HARMs at radar beams and calling it Weaseling is an extremely
dangerous notion. Threats rarely do what you expect, and that early version of the
HARM, in many opinions, was really a very crappy missile. If the threat didn’t
emit, then the HARM had nothing to guide on and went “stupid.” The concept had
worked in the 1960s and 1970s, when SAMs had to actively emit to shoot missiles,
but by the 1990s SAMs utilized optics, infrared, or other guidance sources.