Navy and Marine Corps pilots launched more than 100 decoys in the first few days of last winter`s air war against Iraq, saturating enemy radar scopes with a confusing mass of blips and drawing anti-aircraft fire.

The glider decoys were launched by strike aircraft as they approached heavily defended areas deep inside Iraq. The deception allowed American jets to strike targets unmolested, according to military and industry officials.

''We were going somewhere else, but we knew where the decoys were. It was real nice to see,'' said Navy Cmdr. Lewis Crenshaw, who led a carrier-based squadron of A-6 jets on 40 missions during the Persian Gulf war.

''Instead of the ground lighting up under where you were, it was lighting up over there, where they were. After the first night of the war, the pilots always wanted to know: Who`s carrying the (decoys)?''

The decoys` effectiveness helped to overcome pilot resistance to carrying them.

''Carrying decoys isn`t the most exciting thing. When you`re an attack pilot, the only thing you want to do is blow something up,'' Crenshaw noted.

To accommodate this desire, he said, ''You almost have to pay the guys:

`Tonight, you do the decoys, tomorrow night we`ll let you drop bombs.` ''

The 400-pound decoys are carried on standard bomb racks and can be launched more than 50 miles away from the target. They also can be programmed to perform maneuvers.

Crenshaw said that to an enemy radar operator, ''a target that`s flying straight in is less likely to be a piloted aircraft. But when I see this thing coming in that turns, well, that would convince me there must be somebody driving it.''

Although the unpowered decoys could be picked out from the jets, which are faster, Crenshaw said that pilots in the gulf war dealt with this drawback by flooding the sky with decoys. For instance, he said that a raid of 36 jets might put out 20 decoys.

''That`s over 50 blips. Are you going to take the time to sort out which blips are doing what? Probably not. You`re just going to start shooting. It`s been my experience that (enemy gunners) just start taking them (targets) as they come in.

''So even though we may know the decoys are going only 250 knots, they may not be as accurate. Sometimes it`s hard for us to sort out the speeds. Combine that with a lot of targets . . . some smart jamming techniques, and you can put up a pretty convincing front,'' Crenshaw said.

In one tactic, which he described as a Statue of Liberty play, decoys were launched by a lone aircraft flying ahead and above the main formation. All the Iraqis saw, Crenshaw said, were multiple fake blips, ''with you underneath going some other way.''

Iraqi gunners claimed to have shot down more than 100 allied aircraft in the early days of the war, but many of these were decoys launched to ''soak up'' enemy air defense missiles.

''There were a few occasions were Iraqi fighters actually locked up

(their radars) on the decoys and began chasing them,'' said Auggie Bickel, an official of the decoys` manufacturer, Brunswick Corp. of Skokie, Ill.

Navy and Marine aircraft launched 137 decoys in the first three days of the air war. Allied strikes thoroughly broke up the Iraqi air defenses, and the decoys weren`t used after the war`s first few days so pilots could carry more bombs.

The Navy has bought more than 4,000 of the glider decoys from Brunswick at a price of about $18,000 apiece. A variant of the radar-reflecting decoy carries an 80-pound load of chaff, which is spewed out the back as it glides to Earth.

An aircraft carrying these decoys can ''lay a 30-mile curtain of chaff''

to mask friendly aircraft from detection by enemy radars, Bickel said. However, the chaff-dispensing decoys weren`t used in the gulf war.

''On my strikes were we using (decoys) to bait the enemy radars,'' said Crenshaw.

He described a deadly game of electronic chess in which the radar-reflecting decoys were used to induce Iraqi operators to keep their radars turned on, making them targets for U.S. radar-homing missiles. Clouds of chaff would have prompted the Iraqis to shut down their radars in frustration.

The Air Force has not purchased the decoys. Aviation Week magazine recently quoted an industry official as saying, ''The Air Force never accepted the (decoy) concept, probably to protect their Stealth (aircraft) campaign.''