On December 22, 1965, a naval aviator on board the carrier
Kitty Hawk (CVA 63) steaming in the Tonkin Gulf took a few moments to pen a few words in his diary, recording fresh memories of a strike over North Vietnam. “During the rising of the dawn, as the stars diminished into deepening blue, I saw from the 30 miles the face of death—SAM’s (sic)...[They] surfaced above the cloud deck and exploded —either by contact with an A/C or by self destruct…The fear at the moment of explosions was indescribable.”
The words were a reflection of the realities of modern war for those logging combat missions over Vietnam, the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles (SAM) another dimension of defenses confronting them. As such, electronic countermeasures (ECM), the jamming of the radar that guided SAMs, became one of the most important missions supporting strike groups attacking North Vietnam. Naval aviation’s ECM arsenal in the early stages of the air war included EF-10 Skyknights, EA-1 Skyraiders (
right) and EKA-3 Skywarriors, ECM versions of airframes designed during the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, as the war progressed, thousands of miles from the jungles of Southeast Asia, a new platform destined to hold naval aviation’s ECM mantel for five decades was taking shape at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation.
It was the Marine Corps that first prompted Grumman to begin looking at developing a new ECM platform, company officials initiating modification of the A-6 Intruder attack aircraft to the ECM role as a replacement for the EF-10. With added space for equipment and an antenna fairing on the tail, the first EA-6A was delivered to the Marine Corps in 1965, with a total of twenty-eight examples constructed. While work on the EA-6A was progressing, Grumman was also conducting experiments with a Tactical Jamming System to add to the EA-6A’s arsenal, soon realizing that the modified Intruder would not meet the requirements of the system. The result was the receipt of a contract in 1966 for the development of a new aircraft to serve as a platform for the equipment.