Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  Avihu, one year my senior, had been Sam Khetz’s second-in-command during the Phantom project in the United States. When they came back from their training, Avihu established the second Phantom squadron, the Hammers, and commanded it in Ramat-David. Avihu was an outstanding pilot and a brilliant officer. In some ways I happened to follow in his footsteps, first as second-in-command at the Fighting First, later as chief of IAF operations, and finally as commander of Tel Nof Air Base. Each time I found I was following a serious person, a charismatic commander, and a fighter pilot with a clear and well-reasoned approach to air combat. Son of a middle-class family, Avihu was unique in our group of mostly kibbutz boys. He had good manners and took pains with his personal grooming. His good looks added to his special glamour, under which hid uncompromising ambition. Avihu is an upright, slender man. His face is always well suntanned, and his eyes behind his pilot’s sunglasses are the color of steel. Even today, nearing seventy, he still has all his hair. He is one of the very few on whom everything looks perfect. Only rarely something peeps out of him and disappears quickly. On such occasions I recall my mother’s definition of what a perfect gentleman is.

  During nine hard months of 1970, Avihu was squeezed by the same steamroller that had crushed Sam Khetz. The day Khetz was killed, Avihu had a brush with death, too, when he and his navigator, Saul Levy, crash-landed their badly damaged Phantom at Refidim. Avihu got out of the wreck of his aircraft, dusted off his flight suit, got into another aircraft, and rejoined his unit. He was an outstanding soldier and combat commander.

  After the end of the War of Attrition he became “Mr. Phantom” and the representative of the wave of the future. At that time, the United States had replaced France as our source of military equipment. France had embargoed Israel in an ugly, nasty way. Then America stepped up and sold us Skyhawks, Phantoms, and then all the technology and equipment we were using. The American technology was much more advanced and very impressive. And more importantly, the United States was fighting at that time in Vietnam against the same Soviet training and equipment the Egyptians and Syrians were getting.

  A whole reservoir of applicable knowledge opened for us in the United States. Most of us couldn’t get at that knowledge, or even read the language. Avihu could. He returned from America with the Phantoms loaded with knowledge and connections. Soon he taught the Hammers squadron’s men to read English, and they raided other English-speakers throughout the whole air force. The ever-growing Phantom community, with Avihu as its uncrowned prince, directed the military thinking of everyone from squadron level up to air force high command.

  THE METHOD OF MISSILE ATTACK developed under Avihu was a complicated and sophisticated accomplishment indeed. Hundreds of aircraft were required to arrive—formation after formation—from the same direction and at very small intervals, and spray the enemy array as if from one hose. It had to be synchronized like a Swiss watch. And truly, the Defy and Model operations were glorious designs, activating hundreds of fast-flying fighters in complex maneuvers, interweaving like decorative Persian epigraphs. Each aircraft had to be accurate to a split second and not deviate from its course in the slightest.

  These drills were very difficult and complex, and hazardous, too. I am proud of our wonderful air force, which succeeded in accomplishing these elegant maneuvers again and again in training and in war games, and which got out without casualties. Preparation for a SAM attack drill required bookkeeping any accountant would admire, and the actual performance was more courageous and spectacular than any aerial show by the Blue Angels over Oshkosh or anyplace else. Avihu demonstrated to us and to our commanders what a magnificent air force we were. It’s just a shame we were the only spectators—such performances would surely have brought us medals had they been done at the Paris Air Show.

  Those drills created in us feelings of enormous satisfaction and great power, but I, and a few of my buddies, felt uneasy about all that. Our argument was that the operational worth of a fighter pilot lay in his being free to maneuver, not locked inside a cohort marching in lockstep to run the enemy over with the weight of their bodies. I saw the air force as wielding quality, not quantity power.

  “Why are you putting us in a box?” I kept asking. “Can you imagine sending us to a dogfight in such close formation?”

  “Of course not,” they would answer. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, in that case,” I would shout and pound the table, “fighting against SAMs is just another dogfight, against another kind of aircraft. Let us out of the box and let us fight. Enough of this parade ground bullshit!”

  But once again, like that night with Sam Khetz, I found myself struggling against conventional wisdom. Everybody else thought the same way, and I lost the argument.

  The real clients—the missile batteries—watched balefully from the balcony. They didn’t play our games.

  THE OFFICERS IN THE OPS department looked at me strangely.

  “SAM-6s? Where did you get your information?” If headquarters didn’t know much about the SAM-6, a squadron commander from Hatzerim who had just read routine intelligence reports definitely had to know less. “We’ll know where they are in good time,” they said, somewhat hesitatingly. “We’ll nail them before they move.” They didn’t get paid for chasing wild fantasies.

  “Well,” I persisted, “suppose we don’t know. Isn’t it worthwhile just to check?” From today’s vantage point I know that I was sensing a kettle back then.

  The operations officers said, “You are chasing your tail, Spector. The existing batteries were also thought to be mobile, and proved to be clumsy things that move slowly and with great difficulty. The problem is not finding the batteries. Our problem is how to enter the killing zone of the missiles and get out with minimum losses. And our current doctrine furnishes us with this.” Of course, they were talking about penetration at low level. But the question I just raised put the whole system in jeopardy once again.

  Was it still right to fly at low level?

  LOW-LEVEL PENETRATION is good only when approaching a target whose location is known in advance. But the problem with mobile batteries is, by definition, their unknown position. The pilot has to search and find them on his own. But lo and behold, there is no practical way to search for targets and locate them when flying at low level; the pilot’s field of view is too limited.

  The idea that the positions of the missile batteries will not be known, and our pilots would have to fly around in the killing zone to look for them, was unbearable to everybody in the room. If this indeed was the situation, then all the work we had invested in planning, equipping, and training had been in vain. This was really an awful idea.

  Even so, we had to check it out. We dialed air intelligence. The answer was prompt: “When the air force goes out to hit the SAMs, we will know the location of 90 percent of the batteries.” The faces of the operations planners lit up. Yossi from the training section breathed a sigh of relief and went out back to his desk. There was no need to run around and work to get more money and resources for new tests that were not already planned.

  THE TEN BABOONS SAT before me. This was a company of captains, all excellent fighter pilots and navigators, and I looked into their eyes and saw my friends and myself six short years ago. I also was reading their thoughts. Like me six years earlier, they, too, hadn’t come willingly to the course. What were they going to get out of this? And who were Lieutenant Colonel Spector and his Orange Tails to teach them anything here in the wilderness of Hatzerim?

  I understood, and I was determined to give them a course as good as the one we got at the Bats.

  AND INDEED DURING THOSE three months, until the course ended in July 1973, I gave them my all, and everything available to us at the Orange Tails. Gordon, my second-in-command, had to use the squadron in the service of the Baboons. He ran the Orange Tails’ routine in my place, and we both met only evenings to report what happened, to coordinate the work, and to set limits. I couldn’t watch th
e Orange Tails closely enough, so I limited it.

  In the mornings, the Baboons flew first, and the Orange Tails received the remainder of aircraft, firing ranges, munitions, and the leftovers of eggs and white cheese from breakfast. When the Baboons initiated extensive flight exercises, the squadron would support them with “slaves” who drew their maps and flew under their command and according to their instructions. And when the course invited lecturers, the Orange Tails would sweep the floors, mow the grass, and serve the refreshments. I met my squadron over those three months only beyond the limits of my other life. A slap on the shoulder of a mechanic here, praise to a clerk there, an interview with a pilot at a critical moment were key elements.

  But time kept heating things up, and when I delve into my logbook I find operational alerts and scrambles, and even one real dogfight, against a few Syrian MiGs in the north of Lebanon.

  From my patrol area at sea, I watched the vapor trails and saw the MiGs closing on Eitan Ben Eliahu, who was on a photo intel mission over Syria, trying to cut him off. I called in a warning, but the aerial controller—far away in Israel—didn’t understand the situation developing on his screen. I made another radio call, but still getting no reply, I announced loud and clear, “There’s going to be an engagement out here!”

  Still no response. So I took my four-ship section in at full speed and cut off the MiGs from their prey. Eitan sneaked out of there unscathed, and a MiG went down. But my call was heard, and Benny Peled, second-in-command and air force commander designate, thought I had decided to rebel against the air force’s central control or mount my own war against Syria. After landing I was summoned promptly (Don’t change, come right away!) to Tel Aviv.

  Dark cumulonimbus clouds covered the boardroom’s ceiling, and high electric tension filled the air. Lightning was primed to strike and thunder to roar. Benny climbed the podium with his mustache bristling and called on me, and everybody waited to see what would happen. I got to my feet and explained what had actually taken place, then drew on the blackboard a sketch of the situation as I had seen it from my cockpit. Of course, I was not alone there; an additional twenty eyes had seen it all. Benny’s whiskers gradually went to half mast, and when I asked him what I was up there for, if not to get Eitan out if he got into trouble, he even said he was sorry. To Benny’s credit, he always was ready to think anew. He canceled his preliminary decision to court-martial me, and the whole thing ended as usual: no medals, no jail time.

  To me, this was nothing new. Authority is what you make of it, and the responsibility ends up on your shoulders no matter what happens.

  I CAN’T FIND THE SUMMARY of the advanced leadership course I published among the few papers I still have, and this is indeed a pity. Perhaps there is a copy of this document in the air force’s archives. It was a slim, blue booklet. All I can find is a letter from Benny Peled in my logbook. There, in his own handwriting, are the following words: “I trembled reading your work. In a word, ‘beautiful.’ Surely we shall attain our goal. Benny.” This letter was stuck on the page from August 1973, two months before the war. But the fact is that when the war broke out, we were not even close to the target set by the Baboons in their experiments.

  AND THIS IS THE CRUX of the story. In spite of the negative opinion of the operations department, the ten trainees of my course went out to do research, trying out ways to attack mobile SAM batteries on the move. The name we invented for such creatures was Wild in the Savanna. Later this name became the official designation.

  To be sure, we didn’t disobey orders this time. In a long conversation with Colonel Agassi, chief of operations and Avihu’s superior, he listened and confirmed that I had analyzed the problem correctly. Agassi even proposed some ideas of his own. But permission alone wasn’t enough. I needed vast resources for this job, mainly dummy mobile batteries that could run around the Sinai so my pilots could face the practical difficulty in finding them and devise new ways to do it. In short, I needed several dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles, drivers, mechanics, a doctor, a nurse, a ground officer to run the show, rifles for the guards, gas and oil, communication sets, blankets, food and water, and a bunch of administrative stuff. Agassi shrugged. He was the chief of operations, not administration.

  My base also didn’t have this kind of ground resources. Again at air force headquarters, the training department would not accept Agassi’s oral promises.

  “You are talking nonsense!” Yossi raged at me. “I have no place to get all this stuff from!” I found myself going from door to door, descending the chain of command from captain down to lieutenant and then to the quartermaster sergeant. There was no one to talk to in the air force about land vehicles, so I was sent back to Hatzerim.

  I stopped the car in Beer-Sheva, at the door of Ariel Sharon’s office. Major General Ariel Sharon was at that time the commander of the Southern Command of the Israeli Army, the general responsible for the ground front with Egypt. I didn’t know Sharon personally, and he didn’t know who I was. He was ending his military service, but he was not dismissive of the story I told him. I saw before me a very-good-looking man, still not fat, his full hair white. He was wearing a green uniform with a red beret. I stood in his office door in my flight suit and no hat, and perhaps the only reason I was allowed in was my unruly appearance. General Sharon had a broad view and could make decisions. After fifteen minutes I got a division of command cars and access to all the target ranges in the Southern Command. All I had to do was instruct the commander of my “division”—an officer who came running and stood at attention in front of me—when to go, where, and what to do in the area.

  I left General Sharon and returned to Hatzerim. I never met him again in person, but following that short discussion I received an interesting note from him. This was in the midst of the Yom Kippur War. Sharon was fighting with his corps against the Egyptians on the Suez Canal front. Whenever he saw the orange tails of the Orange Tails streaking over him into Egypt and out again—so was the message he sent me—he knew I was there for him.

  MY COMMAND CARS, IN SMALL companies, began raising dust in the wide expanse of the Sinai Desert. They roved around and stopped in places according to instructions by our exercise management team. Then they arranged themselves in deployments similar to our estimations of how those new mobile SAM batteries would. From their hidden positions they would watch us and launch signal rockets and smoke grenades, to simulate missiles launches.

  The Baboons had prepared themselves well to do battle. They patrolled outside the danger zone, and they devised methods to locate the small, scattered groups of vehicles over the vast distances (we called it independent intelligence-gathering). Sometimes we employed our Phantoms as simulated missiles. They came at us from the “enemy area” at top speed, emerging and pulling up to us. Each “damaged” Baboon left the game, made a circle to cool off and think it over, and then returned for a second try and then a third. Slowly we found ways of locating the mobile batteries from a distance. We tempted and threatened them, and the batteries reacted: they launched and exposed themselves. Only then did we go in and attack the targets. Whenever we succeeded in scoring a hit on our target, it would set off colored smoke as a sign that they were hors de combat for the current drill. The radar controllers followed our approaches, and our gun camera films were analyzed. Our successes and failures were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Our methods kept changing, and our scores improved daily. We were getting better at killing without being killed.

  AT THE END OF THE BBN advanced leadership course, every participant on the course and some leaders of the Orange Tails had preliminary knowledge of how mobile SAM batteries on the loose could be located and hunted down. We nicknamed our product, the method we invented, “SAM hunting.” It was an extremely difficult and challenging way of flying, and the maneuvers required of the pilots and navigators were extreme and on the edge of safety limits. But it worked.

  Indeed, our SAM hunting was just an initial step on a new
path, a far from perfect method, and couldn’t be used all the time. But there was promise in it—that there was a way to fight SAM batteries even without preliminary location intelligence. And it had another, surprising benefit: it was not an operazia. In this method you could start attacking the SAM arrays with any force you had at your disposal, with no need to involve the whole air force and concentrate all its power, the way Operations Defy and Model required. At that time I didn’t understand the constraints such operazias put on the commander of the air force in wartime, sucking him dry and conditioning his decisions. Who knows? Had I understood that aspect of the story better and said it loud and clear at the time, would someone have heard me?

  It seems not soon enough. Benny Peled didn’t think any differently from his operations planners, and after the war he argued that his superiors promised him that the air force would get the first couple of days free of any other requirement, just to execute its SAM plans. Until his dying day Benny blamed himself for his believing this alleged promise, but this is how the air force got ready for the coming war.

  Like all the attack squadrons, the Orange Tails also were slated to be part of the operazia of the SAM attacks using the method for static batteries with known locations. But the Orange Tails—out of the whole air force—had a possible alternative. Only we had taken part in the experiments and maneuvers with the Baboons, devised a new method, and continued to work on it.

  For me, this experiment was an escape from a conceptual box. I felt just the way I had four years before, when the method of “specification of one target” in massive dogfights showed how a section of two could compete in multiparticipant battle against any number of MiGs.

  IN JULY 1973 OUR BBN course ended. The command cars division returned to Southern Command, and the Baboons went back to their units. Major General Sharon was replaced by General Gorodish, and the new commander of the South began a campaign of chasing cars and throwing speeders into jail. Benny Peled replaced Moti Hod as the IAF commander. Everything returned to normal. The Orange Tails began a course for new Phantom pilots and navigators. The war was closing in.