Word: combatting
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...concrete walls seal off the narrow cobblestone streets leading to the Latvian parliament in Riga's Old Town. Four barricades block access to the small square in front of the building. Milling around bonfires near the parliament's entrance, wearing combat gear and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, are militiamen loyal to the republic's separatist government. At other bonfires in nearby Cathedral Square, hundreds of Latvians stand vigil through the night, listening to passionate music and somber poetry blaring from loudspeakers...
...military fist in an attempt to intimidate them. He is probably under pressure to go much further by the hardliners who now surround him: his original perestroika team has been replaced by a Vice President from the Communist Party hierarchy, a KGB man and a combat general at the Interior Ministry, and an unreconstructed cold warrior at the head...
...skies cleared late in the week, the bombing resumed with greater intensity than ever. On Thursday allied planes mounted a record 3,000 sorties (one plane on one flight); in the first 10 days, sorties totaled 20,000, of which more than half were combat missions. In the early days of the war, American briefers gave a misleading impression by lumping all sorties -- including refueling flights and AWACS flights -- together, without disclosing that many were not devoted to "dropping iron," as Air Force lingo puts it. Even so, for sustained intensity the air campaign far outranks any other in history...
...command-and-control centers and, in particular, the Iraqi air force. At a midweek briefing, Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney counted a bit more than 40 Iraqi planes shot down or destroyed on the ground. That compares with 22 allied planes, half of them American, lost in combat, nearly all to ground fire -- a startlingly low figure given the number of sorties. As many as 750 Iraqi planes may have survived intact, however, either in underground bunkers or by fleeing to bases or highways and secret shelters in the north that are difficult for allied warplanes, most...
Though that seems clear enough, some mysteries remain. One is what Saddam intends to do with the air force he has taken such care to keep intact by keeping his planes hidden in bunkers. Some American analysts suspect he will never use his jets in combat but will save them to wield as a postwar political weapon. In this view, the dictator knows he is going to be driven out of Kuwait but expects to survive still holding power in Iraq. If he throws the planes into the battle for Kuwait, they will only be shot down. If he keeps...