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Abstract
The American air campaign against Hanoi in 1967 pushed Vietnamese air defenses to the brink of disaster. By the spring of 1967, continued improvements in U.S. tactics and electronic warfare technology had rendered North Vietnam's SA-2 missiles and radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns virtually impotent against U.S. Air Force aircraft. The Vietnamese were able to rise from the ashes of this potential defeat through intense political indoctrination; research and training; adjustments in the missions and deployment of North Vietnam's missile, anti-aircraft, and fighter units; assistance from communist allies; and American hesitancy and miscalculation.
OPERATION Rolling Thunder, the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam, peaked in 1967 with a series of attacks on targets in and around Hanoi. In keeping with the nature of policy-making in Lyndon Johnson's White House and Robert McNamara's Pentagon, the campaign against Hanoi was conducted in fits, starts, and half-measures. The Vietnamese, however, saw the campaign as so crucial for their own survival that they pulled most of their air defense forces away from their infiltration and supply routes to help defend their capital.1
Several times during the course of the battle, U.S. technological developments threatened to overwhelm the Vietnamese defenses. Each time the Vietnamese overcame the threat, barely managing to hang on until the 1968 Tet Offensive and U.S. internal dissension compelled President Johnson to halt the bombing north of the 20th parallel, ending the threat to Hanoi until the final spasm of Linebacker attacks in 1972. The following account, drawn primarily from official Vietnamese histories and internal studies, shows how a weak third-world country, with the help of powerful friends, exploited the time given it by American indecision and hesitation to develop ways to overcome the most sophisticated technologies. In light of the mysterious 1998 shootdown of an F-117 over Serbia and the endless cat-and-mouse game Iraq's air defenses continue to play against U.S. aircraft over the "no-fly" zones, it is a tale worth remembering.
The North Vietnamese air defense system was an integrated network of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, anti-aircraft guns, and Air Force fighters. Unlike the Americans, who out of bureaucratic imperatives and interservice rivalries fragmented command of the air war over North Vietnam, all elements of North Vietnam's air defenses were unified under a single service,...