Iraq Bolder but ‘Top Guns’ Still Lucky

For the past 10 weeks, U.S. fighter pilots have been taking off from this floating air base into a zone of heightened danger in the skies over Iraq.

Ever since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s military directive in December calling on his troops to resist allied aircraft at all costs, the rules of the game have changed.

Almost daily now, U.S. and British pilots find themselves being targeted by radar, missiles or conventional antiaircraft artillery.

Through a combination of skill and superior technology--and perhaps luck--the fliers so far have all returned safely to their aircraft carriers and land bases while meting out an array of bombs and missiles on Iraqi air defenses and command centers in retaliation.

But for how long?

“I worry every single day,” said Rear Adm. Alfred G. Harms Jr., who commands the U.S. armada now in the Persian Gulf. “I worry about the lucky shot.”

Harms was speaking Thursday on his bridge overlooking F-14s and F/A-18s that had just returned from the latest overflights of southern Iraq to enforce the Western-imposed “no-fly” zone there.

That morning, he said, his pilots had once again encountered Iraqi antiaircraft fire. Pilots were awaiting orders from the allied joint task force command, based in Saudi Arabia, as to whether and where to respond.

Looking out at the steel-blue waters as the 100,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier plowed through the northern Persian Gulf, Harms defended the ongoing U.S. and British counterstrikes and praised the “warriors” and crews that keep the aircraft flying.

He also noted that pilots are facing a far more aggressive Iraqi foe than at any time in the previous eight years of patrolling the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq.

Remarkably, public opinion, both in the United States and in the Arab world, has paid little attention to the escalating combat. Yet that doesn’t diminish the risks the pilots are facing.

“You’ve really got to think about what you’re doing,” said one crew-cut lieutenant commander, an F/A-18 pilot who said he was threatened by Iraqi weaponry during at least three of his eight missions over southern Iraq since December.

Under the ship’s ground rules for interviews, the pilot’s name could not be disclosed.

Since December, Hussein has ordered his own pilots aloft in their aging fighters 95 times to defy the southern no-fly zone.

He has also posted a bounty, reportedly 25 million Iraqi dinars--about $14,000--payable to anyone who downs a U.S. or British jet.

U.S. officials insist that Hussein is paying a high price for his continued defiance. More ordnance had been dropped on Iraq since Dec. 20 than during the four-day British-American bombing campaign dubbed Operation Desert Fox.

The U.S. military has estimated that up to 25% of the air defenses in the northern and southern no-fly zones have been eliminated.

Despite the losses the Iraqi regime has incurred, it does not seem to be giving up.

According to the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., as of this week there have been at least 35 incidents involving Iraqi surface-to-air missile launches, antiaircraft artillery and target-tracking by radar of U.S. and British aircraft in the southern zone.

Iraqi planes keep darting into the no-fly zones, occasionally flying almost all the way south to the Saudi border. U.S. military authorities believe that these are feints to lure allied pilots into an area where they would be targeted by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles--in other words, a “SAMbush.”

“He is trying every trick in the book to hurt one of our aircraft,” Harms said, referring to Hussein.

From the cockpit, the new Iraqi aggressiveness requires constant vigilance, said the Navy F/A-18 pilot, relaxing in the ready room where his Fighting Shrikes squadron gets briefed before daring the skies over southern Iraq.

“They can shoot, but we’ve trained so hard--we know how to take evasive action,” the pilot said.

As U.S. military planners have gradually widened the range of Iraqi targets that can be attacked under the rubric of “self-defense,” political analysts in the Middle East and the United States wonder where all this is headed.

Some Arab commentators believe that the real agenda is to chip away at Hussein’s defenses and demoralize his military as a prelude to fomenting a rebellion to topple the regime.

Some Republican critics in the United States fear that the Clinton administration actually is treading water with no real policy--sending pilots to face Iraq’s guns in a sort of Russian roulette rather than risk delivering a blow punishing enough to make Hussein change his behavior.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen landed in Bahrain at the start of an eight-day tour to the Middle East to explain and reassure allies in the region about the U.S. policy aims in Iraq.

“The U.S. is simply doing what it has been doing since the [1991] Persian Gulf conflict: It is enforcing the no-fly zones,” Cohen said.