Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

The Texas Instrument marketing folks were obviously very good, because I
thought, as did many others, that the missile was generally a waste of a weapon
station. I shot over thirty of these things in combat and have no idea what they hit
except the earth or maybe some poor Iraqi jabbering on a cell phone at the wrong
time. So HTS was only initially designed with enough accuracy for the HARM, and
the end effect was a targeting solution that wasn’t good enough for precision
weapons.
Yet.
A very gifted engineer named Gregg helped me rough out a design for what
eventually became HTS R7. This would permit much faster targeting solutions with
accuracies tight enough to employ precision-guided munitions. We actually drew
this up on a napkin (no kidding) at a place called AJ’s on the beach in Panama
City.
Then there were those of us who passionately believed in suppressing a threat
by killing it. I mean, if the thing is in a million pieces on the ground, then it’s
suppressed, right Then it won’t be back to bother you tomorrow, next week, or in
the next war. It’s dead. Some of us had seen this in combat and recognized the
flaws in the anti-radiation, suppression-only mind-set. This would take almost a
decade to change, but HTS was a step in the right direction and the system would
undergo dramatic improvements. More to the point, it was all we had.
The pilot was the other reason the CeeJay concept was successful. There was
now an entire generation of officers who’d always flown the F-16, and we were
very comfortable with fourth-generation technology and doing everything
ourselves. Sensor management was, and is, a huge part of a young F-16 pilot’s
training. To be able to monitor and interpret radars, targeting pods, weapons, and
all onboard systems while physically flying a Mach-2 jet is not a common ability.
To do it at night, a hundred feet off the ground, while other men are trying to kill
you, is extraordinary. I once took an F-15E WSO for an orientation flight in a twoseat
F-16. He came back amazed (and worried) that I could do alone what it took
his crew to accomplish in a Strike Eagle. Fighter pilots tend to rise to the occasion,
whether it’s impressing young girls in the O’Club or mastering lethal technology.
So we rose.
AMERICA’S ENTHUSIASM FOR WAR HAD BEEN FLAGGING DURING the 1990s. The world
saw through the Kosovo mess, and the general public was, frankly, not convinced
that Hussein was much of a threat. Budgets were being cut and drawdowns were