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Like the Jedi Knights in Star Wars, much of Israel's safety depends on an absurdly small number of daring pilots and their jet planes. The Israel Air Force has managed to use that capacity with amazing skill and daring, as it showed last September when a dozen fighter bombers and support aircraft jammed Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses and destroyed a secret nuclear facility on the Euphrates river --- not far from Iran. The nature of that target has still not been revealed, but it must have been important enough to risk triggering a missile attack from Syria. That means the...

House members from both parties are calling on the Bush administration to delay a $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and to impose tougher restrictions on how the Middle Eastern country could use the weaponry. Last week, the Bush administration informally notified Congress of its intention to sell high-technology armaments, including satellite-guided munitions and naval vessels, to Saudi Arabia, which is a key ally in the region. Lawmakers have protested the sale since news first leaked of negotiations in late July. “The idea that we are going to reward the Saudis with precision weaponry is a stunningly bad idea,...

Did anyone watch Sheppard Smith on FNC this past Saturday? He gave an excellent tour of an underground bunker in Iraq - complete with decom showers and instructions in German! He asked the question - why would a country with no WMD's have need of decom showers?

EDWARDS AFB - Team Edwards made history in yet another flight-test first as members of the F-117 Combined Test Force successfully released joint direct attack munitions from a stealth fighter during an early morning test mission Jan. 21. At Palmdale's Plant 42, the F-117 CTF, home to Edwards Air Force Base's 410th Flight Test Squadron, released two types of JDAMs, the GBU-31(v) 1/B and the GBU-31(v) 3/B, both 2,000-pound bombs, from an F-117A Nighthawk. The Nighthawk is the world's first operational aircraft specifically developed to employ stealth technology. "It's always good to see the test force's hard work and preparations...

The widespread use of smart bombs in Iraq, and their spectacular success, has the U.S. armed forces scrambling to reorganize to take better advantage of these new capabilities. The difference in bombing effectiveness between the 1991 war, and 2003, was dramatic. In 1991, it took four aircraft sorties to take out one target, while in 2003, one aircraft sortie took out four targets. Not only were more smart bombs used in 2003 (90 percent of all bombs dropped, versus 14 percent in 1991), but the satellite guided JDAM bombs were much more effective than the laser and TV guided smart...

ST. LOUIS, September 17, 2003 – Boeing [NYSE: BA] and the U.S. Air Force successfully completed their first 80 guided weapon flight test demonstration of the MK-82 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). The drop took place from a B-2A bomber on September 10 at the Utah Test & Training Range, Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The B-2A aircraft, based at Edwards AFB, Calif., flew to the test site and released the 80 weapons in a single 22-second pass. The weapons were released from four Boeing-designed and built “smart” bomb racks, flew their planned flight paths and attacked all 80...

News Letters Pulse Sports Stripes Accent Stripes Travel Sunday magazine About us / Contacts Archive highlights Archive Photo of the Day Classified ads Library research Links Print Shop Stripes Lite Current Articles Archives HomeCareer CenterEducationShopping MallFinance Monday, June 9, 2003 These walls can talk By Sandra Jontz, Stars and StripesEuropean edition, Tuesday, June 10, 2003 Michael Abrams / S&S The former prison on the Secret Iraqi Police compound in Baghdad. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment now uses the compound. Michael Abrams / S&S Millions of records on Iraqi citizens are stored in the basement of a building on the Secret...

Encouraged by the B-1B bomber's strong showing in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Boeing program's backers plan to push for returning 12 retired bombers to operational status and to seek funds for new upgrades for the fleet. "I'll be optimistic and say that [the B-1B's war record] is going to basically improve the B-1's long-term upgrade plan," Rich Parke, Boeing's director of advanced programs business development, said May 6.An urgent question is whether to readjust the size of the B-1B fleet, Parke said. In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the U.S. Air Force to retire 33 B-1Bs and divert some...

Kim Burger JDW Staff Reporter, Nick Cook JDW Aerospace Consultant, Andrew Koch JDW Washington Bureau Chief, Michael Sirak JDW Staff Reporter With the regime of Saddam Hussein soundly defeated by overwhelming military force, coalition leaders are analysing what initial lessons can be drawn from Operation 'Iraqi Freedom'. A high-level Pentagon team is already sifting through the data. The team-members will be aware that their conclusions will be leapt upon by proponents of two quite disparate camps: those who will use the war to bolster the process of the military's transformation from a Cold War-era fighting force to one that is...

EDWARDS AFB - With advancements in technology, dropping bombs requires more than just flipping a switch. Software, global positioning systems and explosives are integrated to create a precise explosion on a direct target. So what happens when the system as a whole displays performance problems in combat? For the pilots flying combat missions over Iraq, Block 30 F-16s have a new software load, which the 416th Flight Test Squadron has been working on for some time. According to Lt. Col. Evan Thomas, 416th Flight Test Squadron director of operations, after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, an intermittent problem occurred...

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara said on Saturday U.S. accusations that Damascus had helped Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq (news - web sites) were baseless and challenged Washington to provide evidence. Senior figures in President Bush (news - web sites)'s administration have accused Syria in recent weeks of providing military help to Saddam. Shara said Syria was not taking seriously what he called "threats" from the Bush administration because "they do not represent the general view in the United States." "These (threats and accusations) are based on allegations that are baseless," Shara told a joint...

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem meets with reporters on the Truman. It's a familiar duty. He was a Pentagon spokesman during the war in Afghanistan. The greater media access in this conflict has been ''going great,'' he says. Photos by Chris Tyree / The Virginian-Pilot.ABOARD THE TRUMAN -- He was the voice of the last war, standing before the Pentagon press corps almost daily to update the world about the progress of U.S. forces invading Afghanistan. Now he's at war, in charge of two Norfolk-based carrier strike groups -- known as battle groups before the chief of naval operations recently...

MSNBC just announced that Saddam's half-brother was killed with multiple JDAMs.

Bombings 'fail to kill' Saddam By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent and Neil Tweedie in Qatar (Filed: 09/04/2003) America pulverised a Baghdad restaurant in a second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, but intelligence sources suggested yesterday that the Iraqi leader had escaped. A Royal Marine stands in front of a mural of Saddam Hussein in Basra The restaurant in the Mansur district of the capital was destroyed by four 2,000lb smart bombs dropped by a single US aircraft early yesterday. The Pentagon would only confirm publicly that it had hit a "leadership target" in the district, a Ba'ath Party stronghold. Privately,...

Tue Apr 8,11:58 AM ET A U.S. B-1 bomber that tried to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in Baghdad dropped four satellite-guided bombs only 12 minutes after receiving orders that 'this is the big one,' the plane's weapons officer said on April 8, 2003. 'We used four weapons on the target,' Air Force Lt. Col. Fred Swan, told Pentagon (news - web sites) reporters of Monday's attack in a telephone interview from the region. 'From the time we got the coordinates, it took 12 minutes to get the bombs on target.' A B-1B Lancer from...

US says hit "leadership target" with huge bombs AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar, April 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Tuesday its aircraft had hit what it called a "leadership target" in the Baghdad district of Mansur on Monday afternoon with four 2,000 pound (900 kg) bombs. "We are confirming that a leadership target was hit very hard," Major Brad Bartlett, a spokesman at U.S. Central Command war headquarters in Qatar, told reporters. "Battle damage assessment is ongoing." Asked if the target had been Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the spokesman declined to comment. A U.S. official in Washington said...

WASHINGTON - In the first 12 days of the war in Iraq, the United States shot off nearly one-quarter of all the Tomahawk missiles ever built, a pace that clearly cannot continue, especially if a large stock of missiles is to be held in reserve for potential conflicts in other parts of the world. Stocks of precision-guided weapons, including the cheap but effective Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), remain plentiful, U.S. officials say. But the military is also expending them at a rapid rate. Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Monday said about 700 Tomahawks were among about 8,000 precision-guided...

With its combination of long range, high speed and large weapons payload, the B-1 bomber is proving to be a valuable asset during the air campaign over Iraq, according to members of the 405th Air Expeditionary Wing who fly the aircraft. The B-1 has demonstrated its flexibility by flying a number of missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom, members of the 405th AEW said during a Pentagon teleconference with reporters this week."We are hitting a wide range of targets," wing commander Col. James Kowalski said March 25 from an undisclosed location in the Central Command area of responsibility. "[We're hitting] suppression...

WASHINGTON, March 25, 2003 -- Right now, deployed at an undisclosed location, the 405th Air Expeditionary Wing is in what Col. James Kowalski calls "surge operations." That means that all the unit's aircraft, primarily B-1 bombers, are flying at rates higher than what would normally be planned in time of war. That much is evident, as U.S. planes are on daily bombing raids over Baghdad. Today at the Pentagon during a long-distance teleconference, Kowalski, the 405th Wing commander, talked with reporters about the operations tempo that has kept his unit busy during Operation Iraqi Freedom. During the first phase of...

She just interviewed a couple of our finest pilots from Whiteman. They reported on the first major strike last Friday when the big palace went up in Baghdad. They encountered no problems and brought with them JDAM's and the Bunker Buster. Their flights were only 38 hours. They were very complimentary of the people that get these planes ready to fly.