Word: aircrafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mirage jets, Exocet missiles and other French-made weapons -- close to a third of the Iraqi arsenal. But when the dust settles from Operation Desert Storm, French arms makers may find they have taken as bad a beating as Saddam's soldiers. While American jets and missiles and British aircraft have dazzled the world, Iraq's French-supplied firepower has been drubbed or simply withdrawn...
...some measures, the allied air campaign is easy to quantify. In the five weeks since the war began, U.S. and coalition aircraft have flown more than 94,000 sorties and dropped 120 million lbs. of explosives on targets in Kuwait and Iraq. But how successful has this awesome display of aerial firepower been in weakening Saddam Hussein's military machine? It all depends on who is answering the question...
...rate of 100 a day. At week's end they announced Iraq had lost, at a minimum, 1,685 tanks (out of a prewar total of 4,280), 925 armored personnel carriers (out of 2,800), 1,450 artillery pieces (out of 3,110) and 375 fixed-wing aircraft (out of 800) -- including 138 stashed away in Iran...
Each of these estimates is based on the same raw intelligence: the flood of pictures and streams of computer data gathered by orbiting satellites and photo-reconnaissance aircraft soaring high over the battlefield. But the information must be interpreted by human analysts hunched over fuzzy photos and computer screens. Identifying tanks and soldiers in pictures beamed back from a KH-11 Keyhole satellite is often a matter of counting dots on a computer monitor. "With 6-in. resolution you get a pixel for each shoulder and one for the head," says John Pike, space intelligence expert at the Federation...
...other service branches have also been drained. Ninety thousand Marines -- nearly half the corps's manpower -- are in the gulf. The Air Force has sent in more than 1,400 tactical aircraft, about a fourth of its inventory, as well as nearly all of its B-52Gs. Of the Navy's 13 aircraft-carrier battle groups, six are in the gulf theater. Specialized forces in the Far East and Southeast Asia have been reduced...