“For what?” he cried, flabbergasted and humiliated. “For one low pass? How bad is one buzz?”
“It’s not just about this one buzz,” I told him. “It is your punishment for the accident waiting for you in the future. When you get yourself killed, at least it won’t go without punishment.”
And off he went to the guardhouse.
I have no doubt that my decisions, which came from inside, seemed at times weird to my men, perhaps on the verge of absurd. The graphs in my booklet crept forward weekly, every man changing. Suddenly, when I felt a premonition of the future, I would call one of them out and talk to him, warning, praising, compensating, and punishing. My decisions regarding different people were not equal, and I admitted it openly. I didn’t keep any punishment charts, nor “bonus charts” for good work. I didn’t compare people. I was very subjective, all was personal, and they found a way to live with it.
One pilot, we shall call him Bee, kept shooting at aerial targets from too long a range, missing every time. He began to wallow in self-pity. I flew with him, encouraging him to approach to the minimum distance and even beyond it. On the same day I came down hard on some of his friends who were doing the same thing. Eventually some barrier fell inside Bee and he began to hit his targets. Commanding in this way may certainly seem capricious, unstable, even an unfair way of management. But in our case, in the Orange Tails, my men didn’t take it that way. I presume they understood there was method in my madness. Some among my men believed, and later said openly, that this treatment did actually foresee things, and for some it even saved their lives. And what’s more, some of this nervous alertness stuck to them. This was to bring good results in the approaching Yom Kippur War.
MY HANDLING OF THE FORMAL flight procedures wasn’t free of problems. Throughout the term of my command people asked me, and I asked myself, who gave me authority to change air force flight limits. This was a tough moral issue for me. I want to make it clear that when I led Bee beyond the limits, my goal was not to disobey orders. I believed that most standing orders “in the book” were the core of past wisdom and experience, and that as a rule we should abide by them. But the real world seemed to me more complex than the one in the book, and the regulations didn’t apply in many cases. And I also believed that responsibility was personal and devolved upon humans, not the book.
For me, the responsibility to free Bee from a problem and make him an efficient fighter pilot was mine. Otherwise I would have to wash him out of my squadron, together with the millions of dollars already invested in his training. I knew how to turn Bee into a good pilot—I myself had learned to get to the right shooting distance after violating the limits—but I didn’t think Bee had to go through all that process, to hide and lie and be caught and punished, and endanger his life till he learned. The responsibility was mine, and I thought that if the Orange Tails weren’t well prepared, it could only be my fault.
There is a story about an officer who, during a battle, turned to his commanding general and asked permission to change some detail of their plan. The general answered, “I gave you officer’s rank to exceed my orders.” This is exactly the way I understood it: we don’t need officers who turf responsibility up or down. The essence of being a man—and not a tin soldier—lies in making decisions and taking responsibility for them.
My real difficulty was with the question of personal example. This is complicated. Orders must be obeyed, and a good officer—who was given his rank just to exceed those orders—has to explain any deviation from a lawful order. But still you can sort it out.
When it is about ordinary things, I—like everybody else—believe in strict discipline. Such conflicts become important only if it is about crucial things, human life, or the law of the land. It is not by accident that serious concepts such as our notion of black flag, not relieving anyone from the responsibility for war crimes. These terms remind you that the ranking officer is not the supreme commander.
I believe, just like Mota Gur, who taught us in the BBN course, that when you are in conflict on a very meaningful issue, it would be incorrect and disloyal to be silent. You must push the issue up the chain of command, and not give up even though it can cost you in many ways.
But there are situations when even this process is not possible. Sometimes you are alone and there is no time for lengthy processes and discussions, or you are out of touch with your commanders. This is the usual situation for pilots in wartime. Then you must take responsibility and be a man, and decide according to your understanding and beliefs. In this moment you have to clarify to yourself to whom, or to what, you owe loyalty.
I ADMIT IT—MY WAY OF commanding Orange Tails—prognosticating through graphs and circles—was only a partly logical thought process, and a strange way to command men. Still, there was no mystery here. My inner world joined the dry, logical evaluation of men and situations, with all the data, and together they created a unique personal tool to develop sensitivity I had invented. And this tool evolved later into a most important new concept, that of “kettles.” This was a notion that soon turned out to be an exceptionally good weapon in war.
What are kettles? The idea of a kettle was born in the Orange Tails during the Yom Kippur War. The name originated from a children’s story in which a Bedouin came to town for the first time from the desert, and his host poured him a cup of coffee from the hot, whistling kettle. Excited with the world’s innovations, the Bedouin went out to see the town and admire its wonders. While walking on a railway track, he heard another whistle. Another kettle, thought the Bedouin, more coffee! But then a locomotive passed the corner, and almost ran over him. Shocked, the Bedouin interpreted the situation: “A grown-up kettle.”
IN OUR WORLD, THAT OF THE fighting Orange Tails, this joke became a mantra: “A kettle is a small thing that whistles, but if you don’t put out the fire under it, it grows, becomes a locomotive, and runs you over.” We used it to symbolize the presence of some vague, not clearly defined danger. When anyone felt it, he would say, “We have a kettle here,” and everybody understood that we needed to search out the improbable. Gut feelings or hunches sometimes anticipate the brain, which is trapped in rational boxes.
A gut feeling of uneasiness points at a small, invisible sign of trouble—just a kettle, but some of them grow. You might be just a second lieutenant, a backseat weapons officer/navigator, but did you hear a whistle in your inner ear? Then don’t be shy! Speak up. This is war and our time of truth, and we’d better check your hunch right now and find out. Tell us everything and don’t postpone that investigation till tomorrow, or you might find yourself alone on the track with a locomotive coming at you, and the cost will be high.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT all the important, difficult things give initial, small signs before they burst on the scene. Not that the interception of signs was easy and simple; there was always a lot of background noise, and the more sensitive the receiver, the more false alarms. But whoever was listening, heard more, and whoever thought about it knew more. I listened to my pilots and heard the malefactors among them sending me signals, as if asking me to deal with them: “Hey, Spector, I’m dangerous. Stop me!” I listened, and we had no accidents.
It was just like that with the enemy: he also kept talking to us during the war—willy-nilly—and sent us signals. All you had to do was work hard and listen closely. And if you prepared for something that didn’t happen, so what? This was war, and you just slept a little less.
In general, I don’t know of any surprises like lightning from a clear sky. If indeed such surprises exist—and I doubt it—they are extremely rare, and in my opinion they occur because you didn’t notice the signs, because you didn’t look and listen, because you didn’t care to do your graphs.
I suspect that most stories of surprises are excuses from commanders who failed to do their jobs.
AND SO A NEW GROUP OF young, independent men grew in the Orange Tails. I gave fewer and fewer instructions and orders. I was witnessing th
e birth of a new sort of opposition group wholly different from the one I had been part of as a young pilot in the Scorpions. Indeed, the Orange Tails’ opposition was as sarcastic as any other and could scoff and criticize, but this opposition invested less energy in young pilots’ friendly manner, often mistaken for esprit de corps, and instead learned to think clearly and speak truth to power. This informal group, which during the Yom Kippur War would call itself “high society,” buoyed up our squadron in the hard days fast approaching.
I saw knowledge and capacity increasing around me, and in myself a new way of knowing, much more refined and delicate than how to fly the Phantom or lead a formation in a dogfight. Command of men began to work itself out through my fingers, and sometimes I needed to suppress a surge of joy when I saw there was no need to pressure them anymore. They knew by themselves. Young leaders stuck out in the squadron, took on leadership roles, and showed me they did things correctly on their own. A group of leaders was growing under me, and they pulled the whole bunch forward. I was there, watching.
Chapter
17
Baboons
THERE WAS ANOTHE IMPORTANT THING without which it is difficult to understand how the Orange Tails fought the Yom Kippur War. This was the course for advanced aerial leadership, the BBN course. No, not that other course, at Ran Pecker’s Bats. This time I am talking about the new course, the one I ran at the Orange Tails.
WELL, NOT JUST MY FRIENDS and I remembered that outstanding course we had with Ran on the eve of the Six-Day War. Somebody at air force headquarters remembered it, too, and sent out a feeler to find a squadron that might be ready to prepare and run something like that.
I looked around. No one volunteered. This was the beginning of 1973. We still were in a tense cease-fire with the Egyptians and the Syrians, with frequent violations, and we all sensed war and were preparing for it. We trained day and night. New equipment kept coming and we had to integrate it. All the squadrons were tense and loaded with work. We in the Orange Tails were tense, too, perhaps even more so than all of them.
I hesitated. My Orange Tails, a green squadron from the remote base at Hatzerim, was hardly the obvious choice to host and run such a high-level course. Our squadron was built on very young aircrews and ground crews—kids, really. It lacked a spine of veterans and the deep culture that typified all the other squadrons. Although the senior pilots of the Orange Tails had good operational experience, none of us had spent the War of Attrition flying the Phantom, and we couldn’t point to any reserve of exclusive knowledge. The Orange Tails was closed within itself in the Far South, learning feverishly to fly and fight, learning to become a true squadron, ripening from the inside. Senior commanders seldom visited us and hardly ever flew our planes. We were virtually unknown to the air force at large. No senior commander in the air force—except for our base commander, perhaps—suspected the quality that was growing here.
Even I didn’t see myself as the best choice among my peers. Certainly I was nothing like Ran Pecker, a natural-born leader who radiated charisma wherever he went. True, I had good battle and command experience, but mine was definitely not outstanding in my age group. Those who commanded two of the other three Phantom squadrons actually had taught me to fly at flight school. Other squadron commanders were sent by the IDF to study, mature, and get academic degrees in economy, social sciences, and engineering. All I could present on my side was a nice record of MiG kills.
I don’t know what made me raise my hand. I knew that when I returned home to the Orange Tails my second-in-command, Gordon, would be furious. I raised my hand, perhaps, just because nobody else did. And this was likely the reason why I was entrusted with the job.
THE CHIEF OF TRAINING at headquarters set the time frame for the course, and handed me the list of trainees who were to report to the Orange Tails in April for a three-month stay. I knew most of them. They were ten interesting men, assembled from all the fighter squadrons. They all were good and experienced fighters, but three of the pilots had never flown the Phantom before. Thus another subproject was added, to transition to the Phantom and prepare them before the beginning of the course. All throughout March 1973 we got forty sorties into each of them, doing some of it in Refidim, while the Orange Tails was stationed there in readiness. Some clown from the opposition invented a name for the three old rookies preparing for the BBN: Baboons. This nickname stuck to all the other trainees of the course who showed up in April.
As I mentioned, there were no clear instructions as to curriculum. I began wandering around the air force and drawing ideas from here and there. Everywhere I found the stardust trail of my predecessor, but almost no practical suggestions. At last I had an idea, and I sent a short letter to the operations department at headquarters, with a suggestion: “What about using the course for analyzing some practical problems for you, and then testing the solutions in the air?”
This, finally, was an interesting suggestion. Soon I was invited to Tel Aviv, and ops loaded me up. Lieutenant Colonel Yossi from the training department came ready with an allocation of the gear for such experiments, flight hours, munitions, dummy targets, flares. When we had reached some conclusions and the meeting was about to end, we all stood up to go, and a thing that had been bothering me for some time came up.
“Perhaps it might be a good idea to test new concepts against SAM batteries?”
The operations department’s officers shook their heads. This was deemed unnecessary. During the three years since Sam Khetz had been shot down, the air force had developed a new method for attacking SAMs with fighter aircraft. The elimination of the SAMs had become the most important mission of the IAF. Air force headquarters and all of us had put in a lot of effort to figure out how to destroy Soviet SAM batteries. The method of attack changed, and the air force returned to low altitude—exactly as I had demanded from Khetz before his death—with reliance on basics and not just the electronic warfare devices he kept developing and purchasing.
But the air force didn’t adopt the small unit approach I proposed, which centered on penetrating to the targets from various directions and in small groups, independent and free-moving. The approach was still frontal, based on large numbers of aircraft coming in waves from one direction, right into the teeth of the enemy. The weight was supposed to crush the enemy, overwhelm his firepower. The idea was to ensure that at least part of the attacking force would reach the target and destroy it. It was a complicated method, and the whole air force trained and tested it in huge flying drills, employing hundreds of aircraft. The process was very similar to the run-up to Yak’s Operation Focus, but with many more aircraft.
In the end, all the battle plans were prepared according to this method and became operational orders sitting in all the squadron safes: Operation Defy to eliminate the Egyptian missile arrays, and Operation Model to do the same in Syria. They both were huge, very sophisticated, and complicated plans, too sophisticated and complicated in my opinion (I called them mockingly operazias). And they were based on the supposition that the enemy’s SAM batteries would be in their last known sites, the way enemy planes had obligingly waited for us on the runways in 1967, during Operation Focus.
I said to the officers at ops, “I hear there is a new weapon to deal with mobile SAM batteries. They are called SAM-6s, if I am not mistaken.”
They glanced at each other and back to me. This was secret intelligence, but available at my command level.
“True,” they finally replied, “there were new releases about this in the Soviet Union. So what?” The SAM-6 was still viewed as something exotic. There were many other exotic weapons in the Soviet arsenal.
“There were indications that a few of them might have turned up in Syria as well.”
“Possibly. They get a lot of material from the Soviet Union.”
“Well,” I asked, “suppose some of them turn up in our area?”
I SHOULD EXPLAIN. The SAM arrays we were familiar with until then, types SAM-2 and SAM-3, we
re stationary batteries. That is, the enemy could move them from one place to another, but very slowly; it took days. In this situation we had no difficulty finding out where they were at any given time. Enough time to photograph the area—the Fighting First did it regularly—and the new SAM deployment was there on film. The locations of the batteries were fixed for the rest of the day. Under such conditions you could plan attacks on them. Although stationary arrays could kill you, too, attacking them was still a reasonable option. You flew to the target and bombed the hell out of it. Braving enemy fire and taking the hill is part of a soldier’s job, isn’t it?
But the situation is very different when the threats are mobile, and you enter the enemy killing zone without any notion of where that hill is. You can photograph, but even while you look at the pictures the deployment has changed. The SAM-6 mobile missile batteries were mounted on vehicles, and could move from one location to another in a short time. With such batteries, the area becomes an unknown array of threats. In short, if there really were SAM-6 batteries, all our current doctrine—which was based on the lessons of the War of Attrition—had become obsolete. Defy and Model would be thrown to the winds with all the investment in time and energy. All our plans had to be rewritten, training changed, and more. Everyone in the room knew that.
THE CENTRAL FIGURE who had prepared the air force for the onrushing war was Lt. Col. Avihu Ben Nun. Avihu was entrusted with the planning of fighter operations in the operations department at IAF headquarters. He was a serious guy, and he mandated a series of drills of SAM attacks for the whole air force.
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