Wild Weasel
USAF code name used on aircraft equipped with anti-radiation missiles and tasked with suppressing enemy air defenses
Wild Weasel is a code name given by the United States Air Force (USAF) to any aircraft equipped with anti-radiation missiles and used to suppress enemy air defenses by destroying their radar and surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations. A Wild Weasel pilot baits an enemy into targeting their aircraft with their radars, then traces the radar emissions back to their source, allowing the Weasel or its teammates to precisely target it for destruction.
The USAF developed the Wild Weasel concept in 1965 during the Vietnam War after Soviet SAMs began downing American strike aircraft participating in Operation Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam. The program was headed by General Kenneth Dempster.
"The first Wild Weasel success came soon after the first Wild Weasel mission 20 December 1965 when Captains Al Lamb and Jack Donovan took out a site during a Rolling Thunder strike on the railyard at Yên Bái, some 75 mi (120 km) northwest of Hanoi", wrote historian Walter J. Boyne.
Wild Weasel tactics and techniques were adopted by other nations and integrated into U.S. efforts to suppress enemy air defenses to establish air supremacy before full-scale conflict.
The missions were known by the operational code "Iron Hand" when first authorized on 12 August 1965, though technically this term referred only to the suppression attack before the main strike. The term "Wild Weasel" derives from Project Wild Weasel, the USAF development program for a dedicated SAM-detection and suppression aircraft. Originally named "Project Ferret", denoting a predatory animal that goes into its prey's den to kill it (hence: "to ferret out"), the name was changed to differentiate it from the code-name "Ferret" that had been used during World War II for radar-countermeasures bombers.
Equipment
Wild Weasel I
The Wild Weasel concept was proposed in 1965 to counter the increasing North Vietnamese SAM threat.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wild Weasel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.