U.S. Fighter Pilots in Gulf Set to Play Real ‘Top Gun’ : Air war: They are learning a new set of reflexes and mental strategies for possible combat with the Iraqis.

As he crouches in the cockpit of the Mirage F-1 and barrels toward the American F-14 at Mach 1, is the Iraqi pilot attacking or preparing a feint?

When he turns and runs, is that an opening for the American to attack or a deadly setup? And what will the enemy do if he encounters a pride of Tomcats deployed in a high-low stack?

On this 31-year-old Forrestal-class aircraft carrier steaming off the Arabian Peninsula, Navy fighter pilot Scott Segers struggles for answers to those questions. He is trying to think like an Iraqi.

Is it healthier, he wonders, for American fighter jocks to respect Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s pilots too little--or too much? And what, if anything, is there about a “Muslim personality” that determines how such a man will act when it comes time to fight?

“We spend a lot of time trying to ‘get into’ the other guy and his equipment,” says Navy Capt. J. D. Yakeley, the laconic strike-warfare commander aboard the Independence.

From the earliest days of the Cold War, American fliers have been subjected to such mental calisthenics. But the opponent was always the Soviet Union, and it was mostly a game. Even in Vietnam, the danger to U.S. pilots came primarily from ground defenses, not other aircraft.

Now, however, U.S. fliers are girding for what could be the first serious aerial combat since the Korean War, and Segers and his squadron are no longer playing for beers or career points.

They remember all too well what happened the last time an Iraqi warplane came at an American target in the Persian Gulf: The Americans failed to read his intentions correctly, and 37 men died. That was aboard the guided-missile frigate Stark, hit by air-launched Iraqi missiles in 1987.

As American pilots pore over their briefing books, they talk of a time of judgment, a chance--with a million dollars of training behind them--to prove their skills against a real foe.

At a dollar a shot, the fliers compete in recognition drills to see who can best distinguish the good guys from the bad. They scour classified accounts of Iraq’s recent air war against Iran. They meet inside intelligence vaults to discuss clues as to when an Iraqi might turn left instead of right, bank rather than dive, shoot or hold his fire.

In an arena in which war would be fought at twice the speed of sound and outcomes depend largely on anticipation, conversations with fighter pilots leave little doubt that in more than two months of stalemate here, a critical first round of battle has already been joined.

“You know the movie ‘Patton,’ where he’s riding up the valley and says: ‘Rommel, I read your book,’ ” says Lt. Col. Dan Griffin, the operations officer for an Air Force F-15 squadron based in Saudi Arabia. “Well, we’ve read their book,” he says, speaking of the Iraqis. “We’ve got their book.”

These are the best and the most brash, the graduates of service academies and “top-gun” schools who form the military’s flying elite. Theirs is an almost adolescent cockiness, full of swagger and talk about “kicking ass” in the skies.

“I’d like to shoot some son of a bitch down,” says Segers, a 30-year-old former UCLA quarter-miler from Atherton, Calif. “I’d like to come back with some medals. That’s exactly what it comes down to.”

“Obviously, we feel pretty superior in our capabilities,” adds operations officer Lt. Cmdr. Ted Carter, slouching against a ready-room chair.

But already, in preparing for war against this unexpected foe, the American pilots have had to shed some long-taught instincts in favor of newly acquired reflexes.

In the air, where combat comes in three dimensions and enemies appear as little more than blips on a flat screen, it is those quick reactions that commanders say most distinguish a winning fighter pilot from a loser.

“What you need to be able to do is take what you see on a (radar) scope and then equate that to something you’ve studied before,” says Griffin, a 39-year-old who spent nearly four years simulating Soviet tactics to sharpen young pilots’ skills.

“If you have to think about it,” he muses later, “that’s bad.”

To anticipate the otherwise unpredictable, fighter pilots proceed by rigorous dissection, gauging first whether the opponent’s tactics are Soviet Bloc or Western, then considering regional differences, and, finally, national variations.

But they find Iraqi fighter tactics to be a jumble. The jets and training are both French and Soviet, but their tactics are not peculiar to either. In midair combat, where fighters close in at a mile every three seconds, nothing is worse than having to react to something new.

For the hundreds of American fighter pilots scattered across the gulf region, the adaptation has meant learning to describe Iraqi formations in a shorthand that conveys a warning about where danger is most likely to come.

There might be the double-pincer, a gambit to pin a pair of American fighters from both sides. Or lead-trail, a setup for a decoy that could leave pilots open to a blind-side charge from below. Or champagne, a wine-glass-shaped formation designed to trap the unaware.

“You say ‘Champagne,’ and everybody goes: ‘Bingo! Got the picture,’ ” Griffin says.

Not that there are any impenetrable mysteries in Iraqi tactics, commanders insist. A fighter pilot’s job, they say, is to go any place, any time and fight anybody. And the principal Iraqi warplanes--the French Mirage F-1 and the Soviet MIG-29 and MIG-21--are well-known.

But in trying to put themselves in the Iraqi pilot’s shoes, the Americans have now had to read backward from other evidence: his training, his record in warfare, his daily regimen, even now.

“We look at his mind-set,” says Air Force Col. John McBroom, commander of the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, based in Langley, Va. “We look at how bold he is in the way he flies. And we look at tactics: How is he going to fight against us?”

The eight-year Iran-Iraq War has given American observers a good look at Iraqi tactics, McBroom asserts.

Yet, with the psychological duel no longer just an exercise, the complications can be mind-numbing.

While homing in on Iraqi targets, pilots may have to contend with a tangle in the skies that involves the enemy MIG-29s, Saudi F-15s and American F-14s, F-15s and F-18s, each confusingly alike in their two-tail construction.

Even more worrisome to pilots are the Mirage F-1s, which are flown not only by the Iraqi air force but also those of France, Qatar and Kuwait. American officials hope the F-1s will be kept out of the way in case of war.

At the same time, in their mental permutations of guess and counter-guess, pilots need to guard against making their imaginary opponent out to be better than he is. When it comes to combat, commanders say, even overestimation can be deadly.

“It’s kind of like (seeing) a person standing out at your gate with a BB gun and sending a tank after him,” the colonel says. At some point, “you’re going to do something dumb by overkilling.”

Yet, however detailed the daily briefings and updated intelligence reports, the unpredictability of the Iraqi psyche still leaves pilots far from certain about what might happen in the air.

For all the musing, there are few clues so far. The round-the-clock U.S. combat air patrols that peer electronically across the border have yielded little indication of Iraqi aggressiveness.

And valuable as the time for mental rehearsal may be, some commanders fear that the two months of unchallenging racetrack-pattern patrols is slowly leaving their pilots less prepared to fight. Those not on war alert now try to stay sharp in mock duels every week.

For all the cocksure boasting, some commanders have tried to instill in their pilots a measure of apprehension.

“If we just read that crapola (about U.S. domination of the skies) and think we’re going to waltz on up there and establish air superiority, we could have another think coming,” one senior officer says.

But as fighter jocks themselves, always measured by being better than the other guy, the commanders also look with approval on a mind-set in the pilots that one officer says “goes a little bit beyond a religious state.”

“You put on your practice uniform and go out and practice 15 years or 20 years or whatever,” Griffin muses. Now, he says, “they’ve blown the whistle, and it comes time to play the game.”