#VeteranOfTheDay Navy Veteran Rafael Celestino Benitez - VAntage Point

Thank you for honoring another Veteran.

Very important man.

The early intelligence-gathering missions, both naval and air, against the Soviet Union were very dangerous. The U.S. technology to intercept Russian coded signals at that time was primitive, and often required that the signals collection take place at close range to the transmitter. This often put the collection platforms uncomfortably close to Russian defensive systems. The Association of Old Crows, the Electronic Warfare professional association, has written a great multi-volume series on "The History of U.S. Electronic Warfare" which discusses these early missions. U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force personnel took a lot of casualties, especially in the aerial missions to "excite" enemy air defense systems in order to map out enemy radar and AAA networks. The Russian response was often blunt, simply destroy the collection platform.