“Two scalps,” I whispered in a low voice, either to myself or to somebody else who couldn’t hear me anymore.
WE ALL LANDED IN REFIDIM, and my Fighting First hosted the happy gang of Mirage and Phantom jockeys from all over the country. It seemed they were all together for that Russian feast. We figured out that there had been twelve Mirages and Phantoms on our side, and some sixteen Soviet MiG-21s on the enemy’s side. Four MiGs were shot down. I didn’t announce my MiG as a kill, since I hadn’t seen him go down. Some years later it came out that this MiG didn’t make it back to base—he was seriously damaged and the pilot ejected on his way home. The kill was then divided between the two Mirage pilots who had fired at him.
This battle—the mother of all multiparticipant battles—gave me reason for joy: all the hits were from missiles alone; cannons had played no part. Suddenly we were modern. And all the Soviet aircraft that went down had suffered Dagger hits.
True, we didn’t come out completely clean. A Soviet missile also hit my friend Snir, but he managed to land his damaged Mirage in Refidim.
BUT THEN THERE WAS SOMETHING else. I was amazed to learn that mine was not the only Mirage carrying Daggers. The other Mirages came to this battle carrying Daggers, too. I asked how they got them, and they told me that in the past two days they had received Daggers. Just like that. And this happened while I was sitting on pins and needles in Refidim preparing to defend myself. This was great news, but I was left wondering when and in which way permission had been given. Did somebody sit down after my kill, and the near accident afterward, and make that decision? Who, when, and on what basis—my short report from Refidim?
I never found the answers to these questions, and I didn’t waste much time on it. The war was still on, and this was it.
No one in authority has ever mentioned the series of technical, operational, and safety risks two squadron commanders from Hatzor took on themselves when they passed elements from one weapons system to another, proved it, and sent it to battle. They did it relying on their own understanding of the situation, and taking authority and responsibility when everybody else sat at arm’s length. My own chutzpah and Khetz’s comradeship under fire had doubled the firepower of our interception force—and just been forgotten.
THE BIG BATTLE AGAINST THE Russians was the last aerial combat of the War of Attrition. This thrilling victory rectified somewhat the heavy, tragic mood that enveloped us all following the Phantoms’ wars against the SAM batteries, but in essence it didn’t change the situation; Israel lost that war.
Fact: a week after this dogfight, on August 7, 1970, Israel accepted a cease-fire agreement with Egypt, brokered by the United States. This agreement, known as “Roger’s Plan,” called for both sides to remain in place. From our point of view, the important thing was to keep the Suez Canal out of the killing zone of the Egyptian Soviet missile array, which at that time still lay farther away, some several dozens of kilometers west of the canal. After all, this had been the objective of the Phantoms all along. But on the day after the agreement was signed—and in an obvious provocation—the Egyptians moved all their missile batteries right to the banks of the Suez Canal. Now the threat of the missiles penetrated our area in the Sinai. From a defensive system to protect Cairo, the missiles had suddenly turned into offensive weapons.
This was one of the moments of decision taught in military history books, the moment when both sides stand facing each other for the decisive battle. Both opponents are worn down and tired, and only willpower decides who wins. This is what Itzhak Sade meant when he told the Palmach soldiers that when you are cold and wet, this is the time to keep going, for the same rain is falling on the enemy, and a decision is near. Major General Gorodish portrayed such a moment in his famous, pompous words after the Six-Day War: “We looked Death straight in the eyes, and he lowered his.”
On August 8, 1970, the Egyptians looked straight at us, and Israel lowered its eyes.
Strategically, we lost the War of Attrition not just because of our failure against the SAMs. That specific struggle was just one campaign among many, and not a big one—altogether, just fifty Phantom sorties. Besides this failure, the War of Attrition was full of thousands of combat sorties and other campaigns that had worked very well—against MiGs, in the attacking of ground targets, and raiding deep into enemy territory. And at the end of those three hard years our government choked. The failure of the Phantoms against the SAMs was the last straw.
The real reason for our loss had not been tactical. It had been strategic, and bigger even than military power per se.
OUR SPECTACULAR MILITARY victory in the Six-Day War had confused our estimation of power. After it, we were deluded into believing that nothing was impossible. We saw everything through the muzzle of the gun, and forgot how to make realistic evaluations of the power and forbearance of nations. We disregarded the deep pockets of our opponents, who were much richer than we were. Egypt’s population was a dozen times more than Israel’s, and Syria’s threefold. Both were autocratic states with no democratic checks and balances. That, and a low standard of living in their populations, gave them power to mobilize and sacrifice people at will, and supplied them with a multitude of soldiers.
Additional depth was added by other Arab states, and the material and political assistance of the Soviet Union and its satellites. All this was supported by international agreement that Israel was an aggressor, since it held conquered territories against UN resolutions.
SPELLBOUND UNDER THE mysticism of our limitless power, we refused to see the true direction the war of attrition was taking. We narrowed our view, as if looking through a straw, at battles, especially at the more successful ones, and whitewashed our failures. With such self-deceit, no wonder that the loss in the important battle against the SAM missile array, which couldn’t be covered up, was perceived as a national disaster.
THE ENEMY, ON THE OTHER HAND, was wholly different in essence and goals. The governments of Egypt and Syria had no true conflict of interests with Israel. What bothered them was the dishonor they suffered because of their failure in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Our conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in the war of 1967 worsened that failure seven times over—the conquered areas gave material and comprehensive meaning to the failure. They also gave a direction for solution of the conflict; the Arab states said it clearly, “the return of every inch of the motherland” (no matter that most of it was useless desert, and was declared “theirs” just yesterday—it all was a matter of pride). The three noes of the Khartoum enunciate, first and foremost a deep insult.
Of course, insult was not everything. There were deep social, religious, and national currents fermenting and waiting their turn. Still, it was hurt Arab national pride—symbolized by the conquered areas—that prevented any political process between the parties. Probably in those first years after 1967 the key to a solution had been in our hands, but old habits and ideas held us captive, too. Soon we attached ourselves to those new land areas. Sharm El Sheikh, the southernmost and most remote point in the Sinai and a magnificent scuba diving site, suddenly became more important than peace.
Within a short time, we had declared we were “waiting for a call from the Arab states,” but we didn’t want—and soon couldn’t use—the captured areas as a deposit and open a political process with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Time for such openings was limited, since the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—the only faction that had a real conflict with us, and the real danger to the Jewish state—were awakening.
When we chose to fight over the spoils of war—those conquered territories—we forgot our true goal, the establishment of the Jewish state. Our loss of political focus led to disruption of our military strategy, and since then that reality has been perpetuating itself: war and enmity became the dominant constants in our region, and they awakened deep, sleeping currents and strengthened them. Within a decade those currents had reshaped the warring parties, and the substrate on which th
ey were functioning.
EGYPT AND SYRIA DIDN’T HAVE this problem, and they had no military illusions. After the loss in 1967 they pinned their hopes not on victory in any given battle, but on time and depth of resources. The Egyptians and the Syrians looked at war as a process of wearing us down. Their rulers saw losses in battles against the IDF as a reasonable possibility (though some events angered them). On the other side, their (pretty few) wins gave them encouragement and reason to continue the struggle.
A war between sides so different is called, in strategic language, “asymmetrical.” Achieving victory in asymmetrical war is not a simple concept, since the meaning of victory is different for each of the warring parties. Whoever gets into a war like that must begin by setting policy and strategy that define “victory,” and how to achieve it. If you think this explanation fits only the case of the war of attrition in 1970, you are wrong.
POLICY AND STRATEGY are much more crucial than any battle, but it is easy to avoid defining them. Thinking about deep concepts requires soul-searching, including examination of conventions that have rooted themselves in us for years. And even harder, it points the finger right at the higher echelons of power. All in all, it is so much easier to deal with tactical questions—how to do this, how to do that. Tactical questions are evident, clear, and tangible. Everyone can relate to them. They are emotional. This is exactly the reason why that tactical failure, in the battle against the Egyptian SAMs, became shrouded in such symbolic importance.
In fact, all that happened there was relatively unimportant: the IDF—and specifically the Israeli Air Force—hadn’t found a good answer to one tactical question: how to destroy SAM arrays. But the government of Israel, which didn’t bother with policy and strategy and never thought to find solutions to problems within itself, was shocked to find out that the only service provider they ever contracted—the IDF—suddenly couldn’t answer a question. Ezer Weizman, a political figure of influence and a military authority, interpreted this failure of ours in universal, almost apocalyptical terms—“the missile has bent the aircraft’s wing”—and we were all moved. The national discussion turned into tactical babble about which was stronger—the airplane (ours) or the SAM missile (supposedly theirs). And what was not said, but implied, was even more horrible: the victory of the SAM batteries created a psychological image of an unstoppable steamroller coming toward us.
In this way the government of Israel, on August 8, 1970, faced the Egyptian challenge with empty hands and chose to lower its eyes.
We, the soldiers, suffered feelings of personal failure, even guilt. We had failed militarily, disappointed our nation. And since the elimination of the SAM batteries was given exclusively to the Phantom squadrons, the Phantoms’ failure brought about the collapse of a whole tower of expectations. The air force’s then deputy commander, Benny Peled, known for his sharp tongue, summed it all up this way, “The knight in the shining armor has been knocked off his horse.” Those feelings of failure and guilt were stamped deep into the fabric of the air force, and affected its thinking and actions in the coming decade.
LET US GO TO THE PROBLEMS that caused our knight in shining armor to fall on his arse. It is important, since this experience defined the Israeli Air Force and all the characters in our story for years.
First, the War of Attrition had been more or less static on the ground. Soon, the emphasis passed to a vigorous air struggle, dogfights, air-to-ground attacks on the front and in the enemy’s rear, as well as airborne intelligence missions. This brought about a showdown between our aircraft and the SAMs. Destruction of the SAMs was necessary to give us freedom of flight—air superiority—over our operational areas, and to enable us to provide close ground support. In the first two years of the war, the burden was borne by the remaining aircraft from the Six-Day War, supplemented by light attack A-4 Skyhawk fighters purchased from the United States.
Then, in September 1969, the first four Phantoms landed in Israel. The F-4 Phantom was the masterpiece of American military aviation, and its arrival brought with it very high expectations. Almost immediately the Phantoms were integrated into the fighting, and soon they took part in all fighter missions. Then elimination of Egyptian SAM batteries was allotted only to Phantoms. Then the SAMs were being deployed in greater numbers and began to be integrated into denser and wider arrays. New missiles and radar were supplied by the Soviets, and soon some batteries were operated by blond, blue-eyed soldiers.
All in all, this mission took about fifty Phantom sorties. Five Phantoms were shot down in those fifty flights, and two more were badly damaged and returned by sheer luck. This is a rate of loss of one aircraft per every 8.3 sorties, or in military jargon, a 12 percent dropout rate. Such a dropout rate—three times higher than in Operation Focus in 1967—is unacceptable in a prolonged war. Simple arithmetic shows that our newly acquired Phantom force lost 15 percent of its machines against the SAMs in a month.
Indeed, the Phantom failed in its war against the SAMs: it didn’t find a way to hit without getting hit.
WHY WERE THE PHANTOMS getting so badly torn up?
As a generalization, an aircraft that flies in a SAM-defended area must choose one of two optional flight profiles, each with its own advantages and defects. The first is low-level flight. This profile is relatively immune to detection by the missiles’ radars but vulnerable to the manually operated antiaircraft guns. And the second profile is high flight, which is diametrically opposed. Of course, the choice had to be based on estimation of which threat was more serious at any given moment.
Until 1969, the Israeli Air Force believed in coming in low to surprise the enemy, and this profile worked well for us in Operation Focus. From experience we learned what cost (dropout rate) we could expect. It all changed when the Phantom crews returned from their training in the United States. Khetz, Avihu Ben Nun, and their comrades came back with the opposite preference after learning that high flight was used successfully by the Americans in Vietnam. This flight profile was chosen by our Phantom squadrons over Egypt, and indeed, not one Phantom was damaged by ack-ack. But the toll of six Phantoms lost to missiles put this decision in question. Perhaps the conditions in Egypt were different from Vietnam, or perhaps not everything they understood about Vietnam was totally correct. In any case, replicating this method in our own war was going badly.
There was still a last hope for the high flight solution: electronic warfare gear. These top-secret containers were supposed to nullify the SAMs’ radar efficiency altogether. They were rushed from America, taken out of their boxes, and hung on the Phantoms in haste by incompetent technicians (no one had time to train and test them) on the eve of Operation Challenge. The theoretical performance of these instruments—as presented by the American experts—led to the flight tactic that caused my friends’ and my own dismay. No one in our air force really knew how this equipment would perform or had tested it before. It was a matter of blind faith. But at the end of the day it turned out that this equipment was not appropriate for a new kind of Soviet SAM radar (SAM-3) that had just been introduced into Egypt and was unknown in Vietnam. Low-level flight might reduce the toll, but Khetz, Avihu, and their crews flew in like ducks over a hunters’s blind. Operation Challenge failed totally, and the fact that only Khetz’s plane was shot down there was sheer luck.
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED had our Phantoms flown to attack the SAMs at low level using an evasive approach, as in the Six-Day War, instead of arriving head high, like Sir Lancelot?
Any answer to “what if?” must be speculative. But still there is a rational, methodical analysis, called operational research. If it did not exist, how could we plan anything for the future? This method begins with laying down hypotheses, then running scenarios using all the data we have at our disposal, getting quantitative results, and finally deriving conclusions. The good thing about this method is that everyone can check the results. In fact, this is the way science works.
So when we assume that our Phantoms
attacked the SAM batteries at low level and using evasive approaches—a profile we have good data about—we find that along those fifty sorties we suffered just two losses instead of six. Had we flown this way, clearly the weight of attrition would have been different.
But that’s only tactics. Let us look one step beyond the field of view of the Phantom commanders. What about the handling of the air force? What would have happened, for example, had Gen. Moti Hod decided to deploy all the weapons in his arsenal, and not just the Phantoms, against the SAMs?
Aside from its 30 Phantoms, the IAF had 163 other operational fighters (45 Mirages, 82 Skyhawks, and 36 Super Mysteres and Vautours). All these 163 planes were fast jets capable of carrying bombs and attacking ground targets. In fact, they were attacking all the time, and were attacking SAM sites until early 1970. They all had weapons and methods that worked. Nobody is arguing that the Phantoms were more modern and much better in attack than the other aircraft, but their value was well above zero. These other aircraft were less effective than the Phantom, but they had worth, too. If their chances to destroy a target were lower, more sorties could be ordered. There were always a number of sorties that would equalize the chance to achieve the mission with the Phantoms. You only have to consider what price you pay for these additional sorties. This was an easy calculation. We have reliable data about their vulnerability.
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