Gorillas Over Mesopotamia
With most of the technical and setup issues for the new site resolved, I spent a few hours updating some research that I did fifteen years ago on the roughly three dozen air-to-air engagements that occurred during the 1991 Gulf War. This is historian’s grunt work: combing through conflicting accounts, guessing as to the most likely ways in which memories dim or reports fail, filtering out errors that have been handed down from source to source. One remarkable thing was discovering how far my own work had propagated without citation, leaving me in the mildly entertaining position of seeking to verify my original work using sources that seem to derive from that same work, errors and all. Circular verification (or, if you like, “fact-checking by echo”) has to be one of the principal challenges of historical research in the Internet age.
In any event, with the new information on the Desert Storm air war available, I’ve applied several different “filters” to the original kill matrix, which reveal some interesting facts about those engagements. For example, a surprising number of engagements using the AIM-7 Sparrow (a medium-range missile most associated with beyond-visual-range (BVR) fights) were actually made within visual range. There were also quite a few kills made by wingmen (in some cases where their flight/element leads did not also score), underscoring a tactical fluidity that was very different from the rigid fighter doctrine prevalent in Vietnam, at least in the USAF.
Ultimately I would like to collect and chart more data on these engagements, including geographic locations, precise range of shots, day/night, etc. But unfortunately I think this may have to wait—while some of the necessary information can be gleaned from pilot accounts, I imagine that the complete dataset is probably still classified, even after twenty years. Might be worth considering a FOIA request, as both the AIM-7M and AIM-9M have been superseded by newer weapons in the U.S. inventory. We’ll see.