Word: bomber
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...head the new Ballistic Missile Force, SAC's Commanding General Thomas S. Power tapped strapping (6 ft. 4 in., 225 Ibs.) Major General David Wade, 47, SAC chief of staff since mid-1956. A veteran bomber pilot, Louisiana-born General Wade saw Air Force duty in two wars, but he carried out his most daring exploit on the ground: stationed in Japan during the Korean War as commander of a B-29 wing, he won the Soldier's Medal for plunging into the burning wreckage of a fighter plane and hauling the pilot to safety...
When a modern bomber strikes into hostile air, it will carry few guns or defensive rockets-perhaps none. Its best defense against missiles and interceptors will be the countermeasures expert, who does his fighting with electronic bullets. In Aviation Week, Philip J. Klass tells a small part of the large, top-secret story of electronic countermeasures...
...equipment that will cope in some way with the enemy's latest dodges. About the oldest passive electronic defense is "chaff"* strips of aluminum foil tossed from an airplane to give a reflection that an enemy radar mistakes for another airplane. This worked fine with the comparatively slow bombers of World War II, but the wind-drifted puffs of chaff are too easy to distinguish from fast-flying modern bombers. A promising improvement is to fire rockets loaded with chaff ahead of the bomber as a sort of smoke screen...
...radar. One trick is to analyze its waves and then broadcast stronger waves that are just like them. If these are properly timed, the radar that picks them up will see a target at the wrong distance, and it may send a flight of interceptors to shoot down a bomber that is not there...
Most radars can cope with this fairly simple trick, so well-furnished bombers will probably carry decoys to mislead sophisticated radars. When the bombers have been illuminated and are likely to be attacked, they will launch small, fast missiles with transmitters that have been tuned to copy the reflected signals of the enemy's radar or with radar-reflecting devices that make them look bigger than they are. Such a decoy is hard to distinguish from a real bomber, and an attacking interceptor or missile is apt to "lock onto" it and let the bomber escape. Nature thought...