American personnel types don’t like to hear about such a system, because it starts with the premise that some pilots are better than others, while the bureaucrats try to keep their own job simple by assuming that all pilots are round pegs for round holes, plug-and-play as the laws of supply and demand dictate.

WEASELING

Until the introduction into the war of the Wild Weasels and Electronic Counter Measures Pods (ECMs confused SAM radars), enemy SAMs had an easy time against U.S. jets. There was virtually no defense against them. The free ride ended in 1966, when the first combat Wild Weasel, a two-seat modified F-100F fighter, located an SA-2 site and killed it with rockets and cannon. This was the first confirmed kill of a SAM site. It meant the enemy manning them were no longer safe. When they went to work at their SAM site, they stood a chance of dying, just the same as the pilots they were shooting at.

Weaseling was fairly straightforward. A pilot teased and tempted the enemy enough to provoke him to try to kill the Weasel, and then the pilot dodged the bullets while he closed on the enemy’s camouflaged position and stuck a knife in his heart. (The camouflage—nets over the radar and missiles—was quite effective, especially when a pilot was going 600 knots in a jet and trying to see all around him at once, looking for MiGs and missiles from other sites and tracking gunfire.) For Weaseling to be successful, the Weasel pilots had to have much better information than the strike aircraft about where the SAM radar was looking and the status of the SAM operator’s attack on his target. Then, when SAMs were launched, the Weasels had to be able to see the best ways to maneuver in order to avoid being tracked or hit by them. In short, Weasel pilots needed better detection gear and better training than other strike pilots.

After a few months of Weasel attacks, the SAM radar operators were forced to limit their time on the air to just a few brief seconds, or else they would be located and killed. The combined effects of the Wild Weasels and the self-protection ECM Pods on the bombing aircraft meant that the SAM became a manageable threat. Now thousands of SAM missiles had to be fired before the enemy was able to knock one U.S. aircraft down. The growing in-effectiveness of the SAMs meant that attacking fighters could operate at medium altitude, out of the range of most of the AAA guns. The Weasels, by helping to solve the SAM problem, helped to solve the visually-aided-guns problem.

This success came at a price. Too many Wild Weasel aircraft and their crews were lost; the job was hazardous to your health.17