Warplanes

U.S. official asks Bosnian Serbs to oust leader, commanderBRUSSELS, Belgium -- The United States appealed to the Serb people yesterday to remove from power hard-line Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and army commander Ratko Mladic."

The battlefield U.S.-led troops battled with Republican Guard units within 50 miles of Baghdad while fighting their way into Hindiyah. Army troops fought with Iraqis for a bridge across the Euphrates River. About three dozen Iraqis were killed and several dozen were captured. Coalition air strikes continue to pound Baghdad, striking communications and command centers and Republican Guard positions. U.S. Army troops killed seven Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint near Najaf when the Iraqis' van refused to stop.

Washington. It started out like a Tom Clancy kind of war. The first blow was struck by F-117 ''Stealth'' fighters slipping in under Iraqi radar as slickly as in any technothriller. Tomahawk Cruise missiles flew off battleships with the regularity of planes departing an airport, while videotape from bombardier cameras showed laser-guided bombs flying to the weakest points of hardened targets with the inevitability of beads sliding down a taut string. The first Patriot missile was fired and neatly intercepted a solitary ''Scud'' above Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

WASHINGTON -- Faced with a new NATO ultimatum to silence their guns or face immediate air attack, the Bosnian Serbs agreed last night to a cease-fire around Gorazde, starting today.With more than 100 alliance warplanes -- more than half of them U.S. attack jets -- now on hair-trigger to quell any further Serbian shelling of the beleaguered Muslim enclave or five other U.N.-declared "safe areas," President Clinton told reporters, "The Bosnian Serbs should not doubt NATO's willingness to act."

The Pentagon will announce at noon today which two companies will get to build prototypes of the Joint Strike Fighter, the next-generation warplane that could be the richest military contract ever awarded.Bethesda's Lockheed Martin Corp. is one of three companies anxious to make the cut, which had been scheduled to be announced on Monday."They decided to put the announcement as close as possible to the actual decision process," Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Joan Ferguson said. The military selection committee met yesterday, she said.

GROZNY, Russia -- Warplanes fired rockets into the capital of the rebellious republic of Chechnya early today as Russian troops fought their way toward the city, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.There were no immediate reports of casualties in the early morning attack, which came after Russian planes bombed the outskirts of Grozny yesterday and attempts to start peace talks failed.In today's attack, at least two rockets reportedly exploded in Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev's neighborhood, ITAR-Tass reported from Grozny.

SAN DIEGO -- A pair of Navy submarine-hunting planes conducting warfare training in rough weather collided in a fireball over the Pacific, and the weather may have been a factor in the deaths of the 27 crew members.The Navy conducted an aggressive search into today although there was little hope of survivors in the cold, choppy waters. Search teams recovered some wreckage yesterday, but no bodies were found.The two P-3 Orions stationed at Moffett Naval Air Station in Northern California were taking part in anti-submarine warfare exercises when they crashed yesterday morning off the Mexican coast, about 60 miles southwest of San Diego.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. fighter pilots flying out of central Saudi Arabia stepped up patrol missions over Iraq yesterday after U.S. intelligence forces found that Iraqi air force jets had resumed flight operations within their own borders.A Bush administration official called the Iraqi flights -- involving about six fighter jets flying to and from air fields inside the country -- "a direct violation" of the tentative cease-fire pact hammered out by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his Iraqi counterparts.

The Congressional Budget Office will release a report today that finds "major problems" with the Pentagon's plan to modernize its fleet of fighter planes, sources said.The tactical aviation report was requested by Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and key member of the House National Security Committee who has been a critic of costly plans to buy new fighter planes.Weldon has scheduled a 9: 30 a.m. news conference to discuss the report.The study will show that the effort to modernize the national arsenal by buying F/A-18E/F, F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter planes is "not going to be affordable in its current form," said one source familiar with the report.

A Baltimore County Circuit Court judge ignored a prosecutor's suggested guidelines and imposed stiff prison sentences yesterday on longtime peace activist Philip Berrigan and three co-defendants charged with malicious destruction of Maryland Air National Guard warplanes. "The amount of destruction in this case takes it out of the guidelines of the typical malicious destruction of property case," said Judge James T. Smith Jr. He sentenced Berrigan, 76, to 30 months in a Department of Corrections prison on charges of conspiring with the others to damage two A-10 Warthog aircraft at the Air National Guard base in Middle River and then carrying through on the action in the pre-dawn hours on Dec. 19, 1999.