Blind The Enemy

Before strike aircraft could reach their targets, another battle had to be fought-against the radars, signals, and command networks that guided enemy air defenses.

For nearly five decades, the Grumman EA-6B Prowler stood at the center of that struggle. A carrier-capable electronic-attack aircraft with a four-person crew, it could locate hostile emissions and disrupt the radar systems on which modern air defenses depended. Its influence was often decisive, but rarely visible in photographs of the war.

Blind the Enemy traces the Prowler's development from the A-6 Intruder family through its early deployments in the Vietnam War and its changing roles across the Cold War and afterward. The narrative follows operations around Libya and the Persian Gulf, Operation Praying Mantis, Desert Storm, NATO campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It examines the AN/ALQ-99 system, successive ICAP upgrades, the demands of carrier flying, and the complicated work of keeping aging aircraft mission-ready.

Alongside aircraft and technology stands the human system: pilots, electronic countermeasures officers, maintainers, squadron personnel, engineers, and the Navy and Marine Corps organizations that sustained the mission. Maps, technical diagrams, photographs, squadron insignia, and documented operational histories place their work in historical context.

From radar suppression to communications-jamming support, and ultimately the transition to the EA-18G Growler, Blind the Enemy explains how electronic warfare helped shape American airpower-and why its history cannot be told through weapons and aircraft losses alone.