Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

of U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine strike sorties, millions of pounds of bombs, and dozens of lost airplanes and killed and/or imprisoned aircrews, the Paul Doumer was only dropped for a few weeks at a time. Then it would quickly be repaired, to carry rail traffic south, laden with supplies for the ground war in South Vietnam. Even worse, despite every effort that the Department of Defense could devise in the 1960s, the Thanh Hoa bridge was never dropped.

Then, in just four days of May 1972, both targets went down for good, the most visible sign of a new weapons technology which saw its first use in 1967—the laser-guided bomb (LGB). On May 10th, 1972, sixteen F- 4Ds from the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW) at the RTAFB at Ubon, Thailand, roared down on the Paul Doumer Bridge. Twelve of them were each armed with a pair of the new 2,000 lb./909.1 kg. LGBs. When the smoke and spray from the exploding bombs subsided, the bridge was heavily damaged and closed to all traffic. Amazingly, not one of the strike aircraft was damaged.

Then, the next day, four more 8th TFW F-4Ds again attacked the Doumer Bridge with LGBs, this time dropping several spans. After several more applications of LGBs, the bridge would not be rebuilt until after the cease-fire in 1973. As an added bonus, the control bunker for the entire North Vietnamese air defense system at Gia Lam airfield was destroyed by four more LGB-ARMED F-4Ds from Ubon.

The crowning achievement came two days later when the laser bombers of the 8th TFW went after the big one: the Dragon's Jaw. It took everything the ordnance shop and contractor techreps at Ubon could put together, including some specially built 3,000 lb./1,363 kg. LGBs; but when the smoke and limestone dust cleared, one whole end of the bridge had been lifted off of its abutment and heaved into the river.

The weapons that did this amazing job were certainly not the most advanced or sophisticated ever deployed by the U.S. to Southeast Asia. On the contrary, first-generation LGBs were extremely simple in concept and execution, yet they have been the most successful type of PGM in history. Like the ubiquitous AIM-9 Sidewinder, a simple concept behind the LGB paid massive dividends when it got to war.

If you are over forty, you probably remember when the magic of the laser beam was first touted by its inventors at Bell Labs. Laser stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. What it means is that a coherent (composed of only one primary wavelength) beam of light with a very high amplitude (bright in the extreme) can be produced and manipulated. The first lasers relied upon solid materials like synthetic ruby to provide a medium to produce the laser light. Today, most lasers are based on gases like carbon dioxide (CO) or argon (AR). At the time of their introduction, lasers promised to become the 'death beams' envisioned by science fiction authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. But the truth was somewhat more modest, for the lasers of the 1960s had nothing like the power required to burn through the solid metal of a rocket or aircraft at tactical engagement ranges.

Then in 1965, a simple idea for using the laser in a weapons system came to a small engineering team at Texas Instruments (TI). Weldon Word, the brilliant engineer who led the team, decided that instead of using the laser as a weapon, he would use the laser as a way to guide a weapon. Laser light, because it is coherent and tends to stay in a tight beam, has the ability to mark a very small target from a long distance. This means that a seeker could be devised that would 'see' only a specific (coherent) frequency of laser light and guide onto it, much as the AIM-9M seeker looks for specific 'colors' of light to home in on. It's like shining a flashlight in a completely dark room. If you are human, all you can see is the target illuminated by the flashlight.

Simple as this sounds, it posed daunting technical and financial problems for Weldon Word and his TI team. As a starter, there was not much money to develop this new strike technology. In the mid-1960s, DoD was offering $100,000 for ideas that could be put to winning use in Vietnam. But only $100,000 until the ideas had been tested and proven. For Word and his team, this meant the entire system — the seeker/guidance package, the laser 'flashlight' (designator), and the warhead — had to be made for that $100,000, and not one penny more. Even in 1965, this would buy only a few thousand man-hours of TI engineering and technical talent, and a small amount of technical hardware for testing the concept. With only a short time available for development, the team made some important decisions. One of the first was that the warhead sections of the new guided bombs, now called Paveway, would be composed of normal 80-series LDGP bombs. The seeker and guidance sections would literally be 'screwed' onto the LDGP bombs, providing a solid airframe for the whole package. This meant that the warheads, fuses, and assorted other equipment could be supplied, at no cost to TI, as government-furnished equipment (GFE). Then, rather than building the laser designator from scratch, they adapted a design from a scientist in Alabama. Finally, the team obtained their parts for the laser seeker from a West German salvage firm. Wind-tunnel testing of the proposed bomb package was found to be too expensive, so Weldon Word had his team test the bomb shapes with subscale models in a swimming pool.

In spite of the 'low ball' approach to the problem, the result was successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone at TI or in the Air Force, even though the first Paveway laser designator (called Paveway I) was about the size of an old sheet-film camera, was bolted to the canopy rails of an F-4 Phantom, and was manually aimed through a telescopic lens by the backseater. Once this was done, then another aircraft had to fly over the target and drop the bomb. As might be imagined, this made the designating aircraft highly vulnerable to AAA guns and SAMs. Nevertheless, the results of the Vietnam combat tests held in 1967 were good enough for the Air Force to order the Paveway guidance kits into limited production. Eventually, the 'limited' production wound up totaling over 25,000 units (each virtually hand-built) that were dropped during the Vietnam War. And amazingly, some seventeen thousand hits were scored, for an overall combat success record of some 68 %.

But maybe even more amazing was the way Paveway bombs redefined the word hit. With LGBs frequently generating average circular error probability (CEP) miss distances under 10 feet/3.05 meters (a typical Vietnam-era F-4D CEP with 'dumb' LDGP bombs was commonly 150 feet/45.7 meters), it frequently only took a single bomb from one plane to destroy a target which previously took a whole squadron of fighter bombers to hit. Quickly, the cry of 'one bomb, one target' became a hallmark of LGB performance around Southeast Asia. As if to highlight the economy of the LGB effort further, a Paveway I guidance kit cost only about $2,700 in 1972 dollars — cheap compared to over $20,000 for a GBU-8 E/O guidance kit.

Paveway caused a revolution in aerial warfare, and it showed during the final U.S. air campaigns of the war, Linebacker I/II. During these efforts, which ran from May 1972 until January 1973, Paveway LGBs were the 'magic bullets' of the American arsenal. They were everywhere, doing everything. In the south, LGBs from the 8th TFW (the only unit equipped with them at the time) helped stop the armored drive of the North Vietnamese at An Loc with an early demonstration of what would become known as 'tank plinking' during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the north, they were dropping every vital bridge between the Chinese border and Vinh, as well as a variety of other vital targets.

Now, with all this success, there also came problems. While the LGB seeker would guide the bomb to an almost perfect bull's-eye every time, the bomb had to be dropped within a fairly narrow 'basket' in the sky (within a few thousand feet of a 'perfect' ballistic launch point) for the bomb to have the necessary energy or 'smash' to reach the target. This meant that in Vietnam, the Paveway I-series bombs had to be dropped from medium to high altitude (above 10,000 feet/3,048 meters); low-level drops (less than 10,000 feet/3,048 meters) were completely out of the question. In addition, clear visibility in daylight was a must, because the early Paveway I designators did not have low-light or thermal imaging systems. In fact, until the introduction of the AAQ-26 Pave Tack targeting and designation pod in the late 1970s, the designators were the major limitation in the use of LGBs.

The first designation system that made LGB drops in high-threat areas viable was the Pave Knife built by Ford Aeronutronic (now Loral Aeronutronic). Hand-built and fielded by a team led by the legendary optical engineer Reno Perotti, the six prototype Pave Knife pods that were available became one of the single most important factors to the continued success of the Linebacker campaigns in 1972.

In the late 1970s, DoD began fielding a new version of the bomb-guidance kit, the Paveway II. Essentially a production version of the hand-built Paveway I-series kits, they provided the USAF, USN, and USMC with their primary PGM capability well into the 1980s. They have even enjoyed a measure of export success, including use by the British in Desert Storm. In fact, Paveway II-series kits are still in the U.S. and NATO inventory, and will continue to soldier on well into the 21st century.

The Paveway II kits come in three varieties, broken down by the following bomb configurations:

The Paveway II-series bombs proved to be extremely successful, and have enjoyed a long and useful career. The first attempted combat use of Paveway II appears to have occurred in October 1983, when an A-6E from the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) dropped several LGBs on targets in the Beirut