[Llarry]

The Vietnam War saw continuous moves and countermoves by the combatants centered around U.S. air strikes and Vietnamese air defenses.

The most famous U.S. Air Force effort in this regard was the series of aircraft known as Wild Weasel.

Initially, North Vietnamese air defenses were rudimentary but as pressure from U.S. airstrikes increased, Soviet (and some Chinese) assistance was provided to N. Vietnam to increase air defenses. This included command and control systems, radar fire control for larger antiaircraft guns and ultimately surface-to-air missiles.

The U.S. watched these improvements and devised countermeasures of several kinds. The Wild Weasel program was specialized USAF fighter units who would deliberately provoke air defense systems in order to locate and destroy them. A dangerous business and the motto of Wild Weasel was YGBSM (You've gotta be shitting me!)

The first platform for Wild Weasel was the two seat North American F-100F Super Sabre (the Hun) with a pilot up front and an electronic warfare officer (EWO) in the rear seat. Wild Weasel I, as it was known, did not really have the required performance and was short-lived.

The next step was Wild Weasel II, the Republic F-105F two seat version of the Thunderchief (Thud). This had the required performance, but the systems were not quite up to the task. A number of F-105Fs were converted to dedicated Wild Weasel III F-105Gs and they carried the load for much of the war.

The F-4 Phantom II was a natural platform for the task and 36 F-4Cs were modified into Wild Weasel IV aircraft mid-war. The ultimate Wild Weasel, though, was the F-4G Wild Weasel V, a conversion of F-4E airframes that deleted the cannon and other equipment and incorporated sophisticated electronic support measures. The F-4G also had greater weapons capability but did not become operational until the end of the Vietnam War.

The Wild Weasel mission after retirement of the F-4 in the 1990s became a mission assigned to variants of the F-16C Viper and remains to this day.

Wild Weasel weapons included the AGM-45 Shrike radar-homing missile, the larger AGM-78 Standard ARM missile and a variety of other missiles and bombs. One issue with using radar homing was that the missile homed in on and destroyed the antenna, but not necessarily the missile launchers or operators.

Wild Weasel was an Air Force mission. The same mission by the Navy was designated Iron Hand and did not have nearly as many specially modified aircraft assigned.