Foxbat Tales - Mike Guardia

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Résumé :
MiG-25 Foxbat: Speed. Altitude. Fear. The first time it appeared on radar, it didn't make sense. Too fast. Too high. Too clean. American analysts stared at the data like they had just seen a ghost. Nothing in their inventory could match it. Nothing in their playbooks could explain it. Whatever it was, it was Soviet-and it was hunting at the edge of the sky. This was the MiG-25. Born in a rush of ambition and paranoia, the MiG-25 wasn't just a fighter. It was 40,000 pounds of steel, fuel, and rage-built to chase American spy planes, outrun missiles, and outclimb death itself. It was raw metal and violence, welded together with one directive-get there first. But the MiG-25 wasn't a cold machine. It bled. It fought. It broke bones and rules. In the hands of its pilots, it became something more than a myth. Foxbats tore across the skies during the Yom Kippur War, flying so high that Israeli missiles couldn't touch them. They raced across the high steppes of Persia and the deserts of Mesopotamia-sometimes just to take pictures, sometimes looking for a fight. During the Gulf War, Iraqi MiG-25s defied the odds, punching through American air patrols and scoring an upset victory against the superior F-18 Hornet. Foxbat Tales is the story of the MiG-25 as it was used-in war, in chaos, in the desperate moments when speed and steel meant the difference between life and death. You'll meet the pilots who pushed the plane past its limits. You'll see how commanders used it as a scalpel one day and a hammer the next. And you'll see it fall, flame out, rise again. This is not just a parochial history. It's the combat record of a machine built for war, flown to the edge of the physical realm, and remembered in the wreckages, radar logs, and the stories of those who chased it-and those who never caught it. Strap in. This is the MiG-25....

Biographie:
Mike Guardia is an Armor Officer in the United States Army Reserve. He served six years on active duty in a variety of staff and leadership roles. He holds a BA and MA in American History from the University of Houston. Since 2010, he has authored ten (10) books on various topics ranging from military history to children's literature. Guardia has twice been nominated for the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Writing Award and is a recipient of the Gold Medal Book Award from the Military Writers Society of America. He has given book presentations at the US Special Operations Command, the International Spy Museum, the George HW Bush Presidential Library, and the Decatur Book Festival.

Sommaire:
From the Middle East to the Iron Curtain...the definitive combat history of the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25. July 1967: At the Moscow Air Show, the Soviets unveiled six new state-of-the-art aircraft. From among this lineup of new fighters and interceptors stood the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25-purportedly capable of outrunning and outmaneuvering any aircraft in NATO's inventory. Yet even before its public appearance in Moscow, the MiG-25 had been a grave concern for Western analysts. Indeed, this new interceptor could fly at speeds in excess of Mach 3 and cruise at altitudes heretofore deemed unreachable for a tactical fighter. Moreover, NATO's intelligence community was baffled by how the Soviet Union had cobbled together such a masterpiece of modern engineering. The reality, however, was that this interceptor was a poorly-designed airframe with an oversized motor. Although it excelled as a reconnaissance aircraft, it fared poorly as a dogfighter - and it was typically the loser when pitted against Western aircraft like the F-14 Tomcat and F-15 Eagle. From the Sinai Peninsula...to the Soviet-Afghan War...to Operation Desert Storm, Foxbat Tales is the definitive operational and combat history of the MiG-25....