Wild Weasel is a semi-official nickname for aircraft of the United States Air Force tasked with the Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (or SEAD) mission. Notionally, this represents the way that weasels hunt for snakes, using themselves as bait.
Wild Weasel tactics were originally devised during the Vietnam War as a method of finding and destroying North Vietnamese SAM sites, using a two-seat version of the F-100 Super Sabre. They were replaced by 1966 with the F-105G Thunderchief, which is probably the best known Wild Weasel type. In 1975 the mission was tasked to a special variant of the F-4 Phantom II until the type was retired in the mid-1990s.
Currently a variant of the F-16 Fighting Falcon performs the mission, presently the F-16 Block 50D and Block 52D.
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