Back ابن عرس البرية Arabic Wild Weasel Danish Wild Weasel German Wild Weasel Spanish Wild Weasel French ויילד ויזל HE Wild Weasel Italian ワイルド・ウィーゼル Japanese Wild Weasel Polish Wild Weasel Portuguese

Wild Weasel

This article is about an air combat mission. For the G.I. Joe character, see Wild Weasel (G.I. Joe).

An F-4G with WW payload; near to far: AGM-88 HARM, AGM-65 Maverick, ALQ-119 ECM pod, AGM-78 Standard ARM and AGM-45 Shrike, circa 1981.
Wild Weasel patch. The letters at the bottom stand for "You gotta be shitting me."[a]

Wild Weasel is a code name given by the United States Air Force (USAF) to any aircraft equipped with anti-radiation missiles and used to suppress enemy air defenses by destroying their radar and surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations.[1][2] A Wild Weasel pilot baits an enemy into targeting their aircraft with their radars, then traces the radar emissions back to their source, allowing the Weasel or its teammates to precisely target it for destruction.

The USAF developed the Wild Weasel concept in 1965 during the Vietnam War after Soviet SAMs began downing American strike aircraft participating in Operation Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam.[3] The program was headed by General Kenneth Dempster. "The first Wild Weasel success came soon after the first Wild Weasel mission 20 December 1965 when Captains Al Lamb and Jack Donovan took out a site during a Rolling Thunder strike on the railyard at Yen Bai, some 75 mi (120 km) northwest of Hanoi", wrote historian Walter J. Boyne.[4] Wild Weasel tactics and techniques were adopted by other nations and integrated into U.S. efforts to suppress enemy air defenses to establish air supremacy before full-scale conflict.[2]

The missions were known by the operational code "Iron Hand" when first authorized on 12 August 1965, though technically this term referred only to the suppression attack before the main strike.[5] The term "Wild Weasel" derives from Project Wild Weasel, the USAF development program for a dedicated SAM-detection and suppression aircraft.[6] Originally named "Project Ferret", denoting a predatory animal that goes into its prey's den to kill it (hence: "to ferret out"), the name was changed to differentiate it from the code-name "Ferret" that had been used during World War II for radar-countermeasures bombers.


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  1. ^ Van Riper, A. Bowdoin (2004). Rockets and missiles: the life story of a technology. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 188. ISBN 0-313-32795-5.
  2. ^ a b Hewitt, W.A. Planting the seeds of SEAD: The Wild Weasel in Vietnam Archived 1 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine. School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, PhD Thesis. May 1992. Accessed 5 October 2009.
  3. ^ Davies pp. 4, 5
  4. ^ Walter J. Boyne. Beyond the Wild Blue, A History of the U.S. Air Force 1947–1997. p. 158.
  5. ^ Iron Hand (National Museum of the United States Air Force website. Accessed 26 January 2009.) Archived 20 May 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ "What is a Wild Weasel?". National Museum of the United States Air Force™. Retrieved 29 April 2024.
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