Some of the groundwork for talks with China were laid well before 1971, when Communist Party of China Chairman Mao Zedong invited the US National Table Tennis Team to visit China after a tournament in Nagoya, Japan. Mao wanted a larger place for China on the world stage, which would require some kind of warming of relations with the United States. The visit received favorable worldwide press coverage. Dr. Kissinger went to China on a secret mission in July 1971, after the table tennis team, to confer with PRC Premier Zhou Enlai, then in charge of Chinese foreign policy. Kissinger returned in October 1971 and this time negotiated a visit to China by President Nixon in July 1972. The announcement of the trip worried the North Vietnamese, who correctly assumed that China was going to place their own interests ahead of those of Communist North Vietnam.
In April 1972 Nixon received the Chinese National Table Tennis Team in the White House, again to great international publicity. The press dubbed the visits “Ping-Pong Diplomacy.”
In July 1972 President Nixon went to China and discussed with Zhou and Chairman Mao normalizing relations between the PRC and the United States. There were many stumbling blocks, not the least of which was the American relationship with the nationalists on Taiwan. Still, the Chinese and Nixon began the process of normalizing relations, ending twenty-three years of diplomatic isolation and mutual hostility and tacitly forming a strategic anti-Soviet alliance. Although full normalization would not occur until 1979, the first steps had been taken. “In a stroke the trip reshaped the international geopolitical map, altered the balance of the Cold War, jolted alliances of both our countries in East Asia, and laid the groundwork for China’s opening to the world.”9
While the diplomats laid the groundwork for the historic July 1972 meeting between Nixon and Mao, most of North Vietnam remained off-limits to US airpower. If the flow of men and war materiel into South Vietnam was going to be slowed at all, it had to be done in Laos. The NVA responded by moving AAA guns to Laos. The Air Force, Navy, and Marines lost 233 fixed-wing aircraft in combat in 1969—a 40 percent reduction from 1968—with about two-thirds falling in Laos.10
Despite the putative total bombing halt in North Vietnam, US combat sorties there slowly increased, from fewer than three hundred in 1969 to eleven hundred in 1970 and nearly seventeen hundred in 1971. In those three years the Air Force logged two-thirds of the total sorties Up North.11
Washington kept sending reconnaissance flights into North Vietnamese air space to monitor enemy activity. But from 1970 onward air defense sites in the North could be attacked for threatening aircraft over Laos. Lucrative targets near SAM and AAA sites were also on the approved list. Yet in late 1971 the Air Force began falsifying reports to justify “protective reaction strikes” when direct opposition had not occurred. The policy was implemented to reduce threats to aircrews properly operating over the North, a distinction lost on many critics in Washington and elsewhere.12
Retaliating for Communist attacks in the South, Nixon authorized the first strikes north of Route Pack I since Rolling Thunder ended in March 1968. Operation Proud Deep Alpha, from December 26 to 30, 1971, was limited to targets south of the 20th parallel, an area that included Thanh Hoa. Air Force and Navy aircrews logged 1,025 sorties against logistics and transport targets in that five-day period. Due to weather most of the bombing was done “on top” by radar or with LORAN electronic navigation aids. Evaluation showed disappointing results—only about 25 percent of the bombs struck near enough to damage the targets.13
On the day after Christmas 1971 the air defenses around Thanh Hoa claimed another victim. The Eighth Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon, Thailand, launched a flight of four Phantoms against a storage complex near Thanh Hoa. Captain Larry G. Stolz and First Lieutenant Dale F. Koons were Number Three, the element lead, in Coach Flight. Stolz was in his second combat tour in Vietnam and was breaking in Koons as his backseater, or weapons systems officer (WSO), which was the Air Force appellation that meant the same as RIO in the Navy.
The flight became separated in the target area, and Coach Three was last seen climbing into the overcast a mile or two away. SAM radars were active, so there may have been a missile launch. Coach Three was never heard from or seen again.
The next day the Vietnam News Agency, the Hanoi house organ, announced the loss and produced photos of the crew’s singed identification cards. After the war American investigators saw other artifacts in Hanoi that appeared to come from the crew of Coach Three, including a pistol and some US dollars.
One version of this shoot-down passed by the North Viets to Dutch journalists said that the F-4D crashed into the Thanh Hoa Bridge, although no evidence was provided to back up that claim. The American searchers at the time thought the presumptive shoot-down location was about six miles north of the Dragon’s Jaw.
Although we will never know what happened to Coach Three, the most likely scenario is that the crew found themselves in clouds when the North Viets launched an SA-2 at them. Unable to see the oncoming missile to outmaneuver it, they would have been in very serious trouble.
Stolz’s and Koons’ remains were turned over to American authorities in 1988 and positively identified two years later. When they died, Larry Stolz was barely twenty-six and Dale Koons was only two weeks past his twenty-fifth birthday.
As noted, in October 1971 Nixon’s visit to China in July 1972 was announced to the press. The next spring, in 1972, Hanoi launched another major effort to conquer South Vietnam, the Easter Offensive. One suspects this all-out push was a direct result of North Vietnam’s dismay at the upcoming talks between President Nixon and the PRC leaders in Beijing. Hanoi also had to worry about the years of American diplomacy with the Soviets that seemed as if they might soon bear fruit, a Soviet-American summit. If Nixon went to Russia, a strategic arms limitation treaty was on the table along with numerous other points of the superpowers’ relationship. A Russian-American and Chinese-American détente would give the Americans more room to escalate the war in North Vietnam, and no doubt the members of the politburo in Hanoi knew it. Despite the massive American troop drawdown underway south of the DMZ, they must have felt “now or never” pressure. Given the way Communists write history, we will probably never know.
Beneath an umbrella of AAA and SAMs, the NVA had stockpiled supplies and positioned huge assault forces north of the 17th parallel DMZ. The US Air Force counted more than fifty SAMs launched at reconnaissance flights, with three Phantoms and a Thunderchief shot down in just two days. A campaign study revealed that “[P]ilots reported that the intensity of antiaircraft fire in the DMZ was equal to that encountered during earlier raids in the Hanoi area. In addition to the 23mm, 37mm, and 57mm antiaircraft weapons used in the past, the North Vietnamese introduced 85mm and 100mm guns into the DMZ. Also, in the final weeks before the offensive, SA-2 SAMs were emplaced and on occasion fired, in volleys, from multiple locations. This progressive buildup of an air defense system, which conformed to Soviet doctrine, placed in formidable threat an umbrella over the North Vietnamese assembling invasion forces.”14
On March 29, 1972, General Vo Nguyen Giap pulled the trigger on Operation Nguyen-Hue. Named by the North Vietnamese for the Vietnamese emperor who repelled an eighteenth-century Siamese attack, the invasion was aimed at nothing less than the violent “reunification” of the two Vietnams.
Hanoi had planned well, prepared extensively, and still caught the American leadership in Saigon by surprise. Giap launched a three-pronged attack into South Vietnam, one driving across the DMZ and the other two coming from sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Over the next two weeks at least ten NVA divisions smashed into South Vietnam, a military force that may have totaled 150,000 Communist soldiers.
Leading the Northern assault across the DMZ was the 308th Division, bearing battle honors from Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The attackers were supported by main battle tanks and amphibious vehicles plus mobile artillery and antiaircraft weapons.
The Vietnam conflict was no longer a large insurgency�
�it was a conventional war between rival armies. Nixon responded by widening the air war over North Vietnam and mining the North Vietnamese harbors. Despite this, the Soviets wanted a summit. And Nixon’s invitation to China still stood.15
The message to Hanoi could not have been clearer: Hanoi’s ambitions and intransigence were not going to stand in the way of the Soviet Union’s or People’s Republic of China’s perceived interest in improving relations with the United States.
After four years of “negotiations” with the North Vietnamese, Nixon and Kissinger understood that only military reverses would force the North Vietnamese to seriously negotiate. To his everlasting credit, Richard Nixon was prepared to supply the military pressure—in an election year—despite the howls of the politicians who mirrored their constituents’ war weariness. He and Henry Kissinger had patiently prepared the ground. “We were in the process of separating Hanoi from its allies,” Kissinger said.16 Neither the Soviets nor PRC would intervene militarily to aid the North Vietnamese Communists.
The bogeymen under the bed were dead.
CHAPTER 17
“YOU AIN’T HIT THE TARGET YET”
In bombing, the measure of accuracy is the circular error of probability (CEP), the distance from the aim point within which half the ordnance will strike. Not all… half. During World War II the Army Air Force strove for a thousand-foot CEP in level bombing—which was a goal more than an achievement. Yet even in the early 1960s there was little reason for optimism. Circa 1965 fighter-bomber pilots typically scored a CEP of 750 feet in combat. As one survey concluded, “It was sufficient for the impact of a tactical nuclear weapon but is far from adequate for conventional weaponry.” During Rolling Thunder, from 1965 to 1968, F-105s typically scored 5.5 percent direct hits, with a CEP of 450 feet. Later, technique and equipment cut the previous CEP in half, to a still unsatisfying 365 feet. Photo interpreters counting bomb craters and measuring distances derived the numbers.1
Before you decide that combat aviators were incompetent dive bombers, remember that attacking bombers dropped their dumb bombs in a string, or “train.” The mil setting the pilot put into the bombsight was a number derived for the middle bomb in the string, or if an even number of bombs were dropped in one pass, the average of all of them. If one bomb in the string was a bull’s-eye, all the others in the string missed by varying distances. The average miss distance of all the bombs in the string, divided by two, was the CEP, or the distance from the target at which half the bombs fell inside.
Still, any way one approached the problem, there were a lot of bomb craters scattered all over the landscape, with precious few bull’s-eyes.
Then the precision millennium dawned.
The dream was ancient: sky-borne gods who would fling unerring thunderbolts earthward to punish or destroy evil doers. During World War II cities were pounded into oblivion by rains of explosives carpeting them. Accuracy was the quest, a technological goal seemingly beyond man’s reach. American and German engineers produced television- and radio-controlled weapons that could strike with impressive accuracy… some of the time. The Luftwaffe was notably successful, deploying radio-guided ordnance that could strike—and sink—targets as small and as impressive as battleships.
After that war, precision-guided weapons remained more a theory or dream than a reality.
Yet in 1965, at the time of the first frustrating swipes at the Dragon’s Jaw, a quiet revolution was underway near Dallas, Texas. An innovative engineer named Weldon Word led a small development team at Texas Instruments (TI). He reversed the conventional wisdom: rather than employing lasers as weapons (Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had dreamed of “death rays”), why not use them to guide weapons onto pinpoint targets?2
Like radar (radio detection and ranging), “laser” is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” Albert Einstein had envisioned something similar in 1917, but it took until 1960 before Hughes Research Laboratory in California produced the first operating laser. Experimentation suggested a variety of uses.
Because they operate on a single frequency, lasers are small, tightly focused beams that retain their dimensions at extreme distances. Consequently, the “standoff” capability that a laser-aiming device would give aircrews seemed promising. Combat aircrews could launch their weapons from distances previously undreamed of, all the while staying safely outside of the range of many of the enemy’s defenses.
The Air Force was already interested—or part of the Air Force, that is. Under Project 1559 the Research and Development Office sought “short term translation of technology into new or improved weapons systems.” Laser-guided bombs (LGBs) featured prominently.3
In 1965 Weldon Word’s supervisor had lamented the miserable accuracy of US Air Force bombing, with a thousand-foot CEP. Long afterward Word recalled, “I said, ‘Well, how about laser-guided stuff? We never built any, but we’re sure talking the hell out of it.’”
Thirty-four years old, Word came from a rich military background: he was a Navy brat and had served in the Army. One of his TI projects was eighteen months on a naval-industry team perfecting antisubmarine sonars. He also contributed to the Shrike antiradar missile.4
Sent to Washington to sell the brass on the idea of using lasers to aim bombs, Word found a defensive attitude among the generals. “They took great offense at our ‘Buck Rogers’ idea,” he said. “[But] you have bomb-damage assessment photos with 800 craters and you ain’t hit the target yet.”
However, Word and his team found a valuable ally in Colonel Joseph Davis from Eglin Air Force Base. Eglin was the service’s weapons system development facility, and Davis’ group, Detachment Five, was interested in precision strike. After hearing Word’s presentation, Davis offered a one-time good deal: his office would support the laser-guided bomb if it could be developed in six months for less than $100,000.5
Weldon Word was the right man in the right place. A better man to develop the technology could not have been found.
A laser-guided bomb was a binary system. It needed a projector to “illuminate” a spot for the ordnance to guide upon. With the seeker on the nose of the falling bomb detecting the reflected energy on a compatible frequency, the weapon could ride the invisible beam all the way to impact. So the attackers needed two aircraft—one to illuminate and one to drop, or launch, the weapon.
Although Texas Instruments won the nod against North American, which was also vying for a contract, limited funding put a bite on Word’s crew. Even in the mid-1960s $100,000 only covered a limited number of engineering man-hours to design a system, not to mention the cost of actually producing hardware.
An important subcontractor was Ford Aeronutronic, at the time a division of Ford Aerospace, in Newport Beach, California. They meticulously produced the high-quality lenses required for LGBs. The first six Pave Knife laser pods, weighing twelve hundred pounds each, were hand-built under the scrutiny of Reno Perotti, a widely respected optical engineer.6
Scrimping wherever possible, TI bought parts off the shelf at home and abroad. When wind-tunnel testing looked too costly, Word and company built scale models of the weapons for fluid testing in a swimming pool.
TI developed “screw-on” kits for the seeker and guidance systems to be installed on existing ordnance. The Mark 80 series of bombs, ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds, had been developed by Douglas Aircraft in the 1950s. With a uniform aerodynamic shape regardless of weight, they provided far better ballistic properties than the previous “fat bombs” of World War II and Korea fame. The Mark 80 series were the ideal teammates for laser-guided technology. M118 3,000-pounders were fitted with guidance kits in 1969. The M118 provided 50 percent more bang than the Mark 84 and three times as much as a Mark 83.7
In 1967 the LGB was dubbed Paveway, an apparently poetic choice, as the laser paved the way through the sky for the weapon. Reputedly “Pave” was an acronym for precision avionics vectoring equipment; however, industry and scientific sources st
ate that “Pave” referred to the overall Air Force project under which LGBs were developed.8
Regardless of the origin of the name, Paveway was a spectacular success, meeting contract requirements for a twenty-five-foot CEP and 80 percent guidance reliability. The weapon sold itself. The original order was for fifty seeker kits. Then, in June 1968, the Air Force paid $4.7 million for 293 more LGB kits. The airmen soon bought another thousand.9
Aircrews appreciated the high prices of LGB and electro-optical bombs, the latter running $17,000 or more each, four times the cost of the initial batch of Paveways. But the unit cost of Paveways continued to drop as production increased.10
A Paveway I involved three elements: a bomb, the AGM-45 Shrike antiradar missile’s control activator, and the laser seeker. The TI system included rear-mounted cruciform airfoils on the bomb for stabilization in flight and moveable canards up front to steer the weapon to its target dot of laser light.
When dropped, the unpowered glide-bomb entered a laser capture area, or “basket,” from which it followed its natural trajectory earthward as it steered toward the laser dot target. The basket was the open end of a cone, with the small end on the laser dot.
In flight an LGB described a shallow sine wave toward the laser-dot target. As the dive angle changed, the weapon’s canards compensated accordingly. When the bomb’s flight path took it above the perfect trajectory, the weapon’s canards tipped down to lower the nose. If the weapon descended below the perfect trajectory, the canards rotated upward to raise the nose, as per any well-behaved aircraft. Similarly, it would adjust left or right to respond to wind drift.
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