Word: combatting
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...streets, their horns blowing at pedestrians and the occasional horse-drawn cart to make room for P.L.A. officers on their way to the regimental headquarters of the specially trained border troops garrisoned on the outskirts of town. On a nearby hilltop are a high-frequency radio tower for combat communications and an early-warning radar that would help alert the MiGs in Mudanjiang to scramble in the event of a Soviet attack...
...plane had been detected, it was blown to bits before coming close enough to do any damage -- or even be seen by the unaided eye. The Aegis system, the most sophisticated battle-managing array of radars, sensors, computers and automatically guided weapons ever put together, had worked under combat conditions exactly as it was supposed to. Except...
...ship nowadays can easily be sunk by a missile delivered from a plane that no one on board ever sees. In the open ocean, a possibly hostile plane can be tracked over hundreds of miles. But Admiral William Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has likened combat in the Persian Gulf -- only about 25 miles wide at the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes or even seconds after it first appears on a radar screen; a captain who hesitates...
According to Admiral Crowe, the action began when a helicopter from the Vincennes was fired upon at 10:10 a.m. local time by Iranian surface vessels. Before long the Vincennes was in combat with at least three armed Iranian speedboats, two of which were sunk and a third damaged. During that battle, the radar aboard the Vincennes detected an aircraft heading toward the ship at high speed -- approximately 520 m.p.h. The plane was at least four or five miles away from any air corridor normally used by commercial jets. Crowe insisted that the Vincennes had tried to communicate with...
Crowe dismissed parallels between Sunday's accident and the Korean Air Lines disaster. The Iranian jetliner, he pointed out, had flown into a combat zone, unlike the KAL plane, which merely strayed into Soviet airspace. The admiral emphasized that the tragedy had to be viewed against the background of the growing hostilities in the gulf over the past two years. He cited the May 1987 engagement in which an Iraqi missile hit the U.S.S. Stark and killed 37 American seamen and the subsequent incidents in which the tanker Bridgeton and the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, a frigate, were damaged...