BOOK REVIEW: Raid on the Sun – Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb

I actually finished reading this book sometime during the last quarter of last year, but it’s only now that I got to go around and review it. The book is about a successful raid by the “Heyl Ha’Avir” (Israeli Air Force) in 1981 using their F-16 Fighting Falcons on a Nuclear Reactor in Iraq called “Osirak”. The raid is significant for a number of reasons, first of which is that it was the first time the F-16 was used to bomb a target in actual combat.

Second was that the F-16 was very new to the Israelis, the first ones were delivered in January of 1980 and yet just over a year later they were already using it in combat. Third was that the Israelis did have a number of older aircraft that they were more familiar with like the F-4 Phantom, for example, and yet despite that they insisted on using the F-16 instead, a testament to the aircraft’s capabilities.

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BOOK REVIEW: Magnum! The Wild Weasels in Desert Storm

After months of “Reading While Standing in Line” on my Smartphone, I finally finished the book “Magnum! The Wild Weasels in Desert Storm”. The term “Wild Weasels” is the code name assigned by the United States Air Force (USAF) to their aircraft assigned to seek and destroy enemy Surface to Air Missile (SAM) installations.

The first chapters of the book covered the history, description and tactics used by these Wild Weasel aircraft from its inception during the Vietnam War all the way to Desert Storm. The middle chapters covered the pre-deployment and deployment of its crews to Desert Storm and relied mostly on direct quotations from the memoirs and diaries of a couple of pilots.