Page 28 - Air Fields News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Early in 1965, the president decided to launch operation rolling thunder, a sustained bombing campaign directed against north vietnam. >> the emphasis is on the destruction of strategic enemy targets. raids are designed to cut off supplies to the north from vietcong rebels in the south. >> our first mission was more or less static defense of the principle air field for the bombing missions over north vietnam. >> general, will this entail any offensive operations? >> no, no, i don't believe it will. >> the reason we put ground troops in was to protect air fields. and then we had to protect grou...

Evacuations of personnel should that happen. >> and i was going to say, the evacuation, that's the escape valve. that's the way that any of the numbers of people who are still at the u.s. embassy would get out from the airport route. what about -- >> reporter: it wouldn't be the only way. they have other alternatives but that is an escape route and clearly the officials here are watching. you don't want the main door of baghdad international airport to slam shut. there are other airports. there are military air fields, other commercial areas in this country so it wouldn't be that the embassy s...

The american forces, the american public and our national security. so i would dearly like it. but when you're almost 33% off on your mileage moving at almost 700 miles in the leg i'm beginning to question their methods. look, they are doing a very tough job in a very tough area. and the poseidon is the best search vehicle from the air that we have got. except we could probably have global hawks that stay up 38 hours, 20 hours, it depends. whereas we're only getting four or five hours on the poseidon, we need more persistence there to help the poseidon. >> why don't we do that? >> it is not a ...

Then it is no longer a threat to the american forces, the american public and our national security. so i would dearly like it. but when you're almost 33% off on your mileage moving at almost 700 miles in the leg i'm beginning to question their methods. look, they are doing a very tough job in a very tough area. and the poseidon is the best search vehicle from the air that we have got. except we could probably have global hawks that stay up 38 hours, 20 hours, it depends. whereas we're only getting four or five hours on the poseidon, we need more persistence there to help the poseidon. >> why ...

One has inspected any international forces, no international organization has inspected the pakistani air fields or the iranian air fields or anything like that. so i don't think we can rule anything out including terrorism. we also have to look at patterns of behavior on the pilot and co-pilot. and they have some very interesting patterns of behavior despite what his son said. first of all, the captain of an airplane is in charge if anything goes wrong. if it is mechanical or something like that, he still must take certain actions. there were actions that were taken prior to the transponder b...