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File: aabfd_06.txtIn the last couple of weeks there have been more and more decoys and of course more burned out hulks that require some discrimination to insure that you are not wasting ammunition on decoys and hulks. That requires a good bit of binocular work and concentration to be sure you are not wasting good resources on bad targets. S: From your perspective as a pilot flying out of this FOL and coming back, is there anything that has peen changed that you set up prior to actually flying missions out of here? R: No. We have continued to make improvements to the operation. Just in the last 3 or 4 days we were able to begin operations off our first set of revetments on our north ICT [integrated combat turns] pad. The second one is coming along. Those items were in the works before my time, but it has taken a long time to get the asphalt resources and engineer resources to get those up and going. Until the last 2 or 3 days, all of our combat turns, ammunition reloads, have been off of the parallel taxiway. We have continued to try to work to get off the parallel taxiway and into those revetted areas, both from a survivability of the aircraft and the munitions we are working with, and also to have the parallel taxiway available as an alternate runway in case, for some reason during the course of the combat operations, we have to shut down the main runway. That has been the big change noticeable to pilots. Basically, everything else from a pilot perspective has remained consistent from the first day of the war in the way we had it set up. That stabilized very quickly, and I think it is fair to say we have concluded that we had a pretty good plan. I would have to give most of the credit for that. 6
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