F-14 upgrade effort for Iraq war wins plaudits on Capitol Hill

To give the venerable F-14 Tomcat fighter jet a bigger role in the war against Iraq, the Navy rushed a newly-developed software upgrade to all 30 "D model" aircraft in the war zone, enabling them to drop the most devastating satellite-guided bunker buster bombs on targets in Iraq last week, Navy officials said Monday.

This effort to get a new war-fighting capability out to the field quickly drew praise from aides to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and other lawmakers who have criticized the military's "procurement bureaucracy" for taking too long to develop and test new weapons and equipment for U.S. combat forces.

"Any effort to quickly equip our soldiers with the best technology available is obviously a step in the right direction," said a spokesman for House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee Chairman Curt Weldon, R-Pa. "While Congressman Weldon believes in rigorous testing procedures that are currently in place, there are always ways to streamline these processes."

A spokesman for Hunter said Hunter "would be pleased that, one, we've found a quick way to get a weapon into the field and, two, it allows the deployment of more precision munitions."

All 30 F-14D fighters participating in the war, aboard the aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Constellation, were modified about five to six months ahead of schedule after accelerated testing of a software upgrade yielded positive results, said Denise Deon, a spokeswoman for the Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, Md.

On Feb. 2, the Navy command put an upgrade support team to work aboard the Roosevelt to make the necessary changes to aircraft bomb racks and software and then sent the team to the other carriers, Deon said. Upgrades to all forward-deployed F-14Ds and the training of 90 aircrew and maintenance personnel were completed within 17 days, so each plane was capable of carrying four Joint Direct Attack Munitions-or JDAMs-by the time war began last Wednesday.

These satellite-guided bombs, along with cruise missiles, have been the primary weapons in the so-called shock-and-awe campaign against fixed targets in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere in Iraq.

A Navy F-14D from the Constellation gave the upgrade its first "operational" test on March 1 when it destroyed a ground target while patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq, said Lt. Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman. "We are using the JDAM F-14D capability right now in operations against Iraq," he said.

The F-14, featured in the hit movie "Top Gun" with its distinctive twin engines, supersonic speed and variable sweep wings, entered the Navy fleet in 1973, a product of the old Grumman Aerospace Corp. designed for air-to-air combat in all weather conditions. The most advanced model, the F-14D, was last delivered to the Navy in 1992 and is expected to be replaced by F/A-18E and F Super Hornets in about five years.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict, the U.S.-led coalition swept the skies clean of Iraqi aircraft very early in the conflict, leaving at least two carrier-based squadrons of F-14s in the war zone without a major role to play for the rest of the conflict.

So Navy leaders decided after the war to devise removable bomb racks for F-14s that would let them carry up to four 2,000 pound MK-80 "dumb" bombs. Four years later, they added the LANTIRN targeting system to permit delivery of laser-guided bombs over Bosnia. When Tomcat pilots began training in late 1992 for air-to-ground missions, many dubbed their converted aircraft "Bombcats."

Last Friday, during a war briefing for Pentagon reporters, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed two videos of strikes by F-14D Tomcats against a missile support vehicle and an Iraqi missile storage facility in Basra. The bombs used probably were JDAMs as a result of the recent upgrades, Hernandez said.

"The Tomcat has proven itself time and again," said Navy Capt. Peter Williams, the naval command's F-14 program manager. "You could say that the cat has many lives, and once again we've added more capability to a mature platform."