On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 21:19:12 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On 9 Feb 2004 12:43:39 -0800, jim rozen
wrote:

In article , Gunner says...

Ah Jim...Dubya WAS an F-102 pilot ...

Tough to get shot at, in texas.

Jim

And if his squadron had been deployed to RVN?

Lots of Bear bombers over RVN were there?

The F-102 was designed and tasked to intercept
Soviet intercontinental nuclear bombers. It wasn't
much good for anything else. It had no strike
capability, and was probably the world's worst
dogfighter.

Some of them were used in Vietnam early on
in the escort role (for which they were very ill
suited), 15 were lost. But they'd been withdrawn
from service over VN by the time Bush joined the
Air Guard.

They were designed to run down bombers entering
our airspace, not for penetrating what was then the
world's most intense air defense network.

The primary operational task of Bush's air guard unit
was to intercept Soviet Bear bombers staging out of
Cuba. They intercepted them and escorted them away
from our airspace. (The Soviets routinely probed
our air defenses that way in those days.)

That was a valid military mission, no less so than the
guys in the heavy tank squadrons positioned eyeball
to eyeball with the Soviets in northern Germany. But
neither weapons system, nor their crews, could be of
much use in Vietnam.

Gary