Techniques for performing erasure detection and power control for a transmission without error detection coding are described. For erasure detection, a transmitter transmits codewords via a wireless channel. A receiver computes a metric for each received codeword, compares the computed metric against an erasure threshold, and declares the received codeword to be "erased" or "non-erased". The receiver dynamically adjusts the transmit power based on whether the codewords met the erasure threshold or not.