I reminded Benny of that conversation and we both laughed a little.
In the end, he entrusted me with changing operational training in the air force. I hesitated.
“According to the lessons of the war?”
“Yes,” he finally conceded, halfheartedly. “According to the lessons I shall confirm.” I understood that instead of fighting we had to turn a new leaf together. I shut up and went to work.
AFTER TWO YEARS OF CHANGING our operational training, which involved hard work from a military organization recovering from war and dealing with a host of problems, I was sent for an advanced degree in the United States. There I found out that war had more dimensions than a clean shot or getting the bombs on the target. For instance, I discovered the economic side of war.
The understanding began with a deeper look into the issue of the missiles. Missiles—all types—could be thought of as unmanned aircraft drones, weapons that could be launched from a distance and could fly independently, navigate to targets, and hit them. The common denominator for all those weapons was that they enabled hitting without being hit. The chief cost factor for aircraft and pilots was rate of loss, and aircraft and pilot costs were rising fast. Drones were cheap. They could perform missions too costly for manned aircraft and lowered the cost of decision-making and the economic impact of war. When I came to that conclusion, I found it had far-reaching, strategic results.
BEFORE I WENT FOR ADVANCED study, I had no interest in model planes of any kind. Only a very few men in the Israeli Air Force at that time had minds open enough to discuss such things. Lieutenant Colonel Dotan, for example, was doing experiments with radio-controlled model aircraft with cameras, to get intelligence from enemy areas. I admit I didn’t understand what made one of our best fighter pilots get involved in such a perverse and arcane subject. Drones, like computers, seemed to me as irrelevant for attacking missile arrays and other difficult ground targets as helicopters carrying little green men. In short, I remained a simple fighter pilot, a knight among knights. A pilot is a pilot is a pilot, with all the panache and limitations that come with this profession
IN 1976, WHEN I WAS SENT TO STUDY for a master’s degree at UCLA, in the United States, and especially after I began visiting the RAND Corporation, I got out of the fighter pilot box. Suddenly I saw new ways to look at war, not just as a medieval knight might have disdained the new technology of gunpowder.
I saw two clear technical developments relating to missiles and other unmanned aerial devices that changed my worldview: One, the accuracy of those devices was consistently getting better; and two, the cost of these systems was coming down. Then I recalled that the same process had taken place with our air-to-air missiles, and with the Soviet antiaircraft missiles that had killed us.
This was interesting. I gathered data, connected colored dots, and produced lines—of performance, of cost, of accuracy. I divided the X axis into years and found that the ratio of improvement in all aspects was accelerating. Suddenly a trend emerged: drones were capable of doing certain jobs very well, and were getting better. I understood that these devices were headed for some point in the future when they would be more cost-effective than manned aircraft in other jobs, too—for example, in attacking ground targets. And since they were so cheap—no human life was involved—their use was less conditioned: you could employ them even in tough situations with high loss rates; this was almost just an economic consideration.
I stretched my graphs into the future on a military setup I knew well. My calculations pointed to a nexus in the future in which a state using this kind of technology could inflict a fast, lethal, and above all unconditional blow on enemy forces. This was stunning. You could go for it all at once, with very few limiting military conditions.
The more I thought about manned aircraft and their missions and remembered Yak’s dictum, the more I thought it would be inefficient to fight antiaircraft systems with aircraft. And my new opinions went even further than that: I thought that antiaircraft systems, including missile batteries, were not targets in themselves. They were just nuisances, impediments on our way to our real targets: the enemy’s military assets. Elimination of the missiles, which employed most of our attention, was in principle a “parasitic” activity, a detour. I began to see things I had thought heroic before in a new, critical way. I began to think that we would be better off building weapons systems against the real targets. The new weapons opened a way to develop a first-strike capability to hit the enemy’s war machine directly without dealing with those antiaircraft and missile batteries. This required that we arm ourselves with systems other than fighter aircraft. The fighters were expensive, and since the Yom Kippur War seemed to me not efficient enough—even with aerial superiority—against the multitude of targets presented by the enemy’s military. The fighters were good to destroy specific, expensive targets, but you couldn’t get them to produce high-elimination capacity on the battlefield. And the enemy’s ack-ack and mini-SAMs, which could never be completely eliminated, kept promising a fall rate of more than 1 percent, which would keep manned fighters too far away from their targets. On the other hand, unmanned vehicles, which could suffer a much higher rate of loss due to their low cost, seemed to me a workable solution.
I began imagining thousands of small, cheap, unmanned missiles ignoring the enemy’s antiaircraft systems, passing through them and hitting his tanks and armored personnel carriers. I envisioned a first strike, not a nuclear bomb on cities in the style of Giulio Douhet or psychological devastation like Operation Focus in 1967, but a new strategic shock that would paralyze the enemy’s military power at the start of a war.
AND SO, WHEN I REPORTED to air force headquarters after a year of leave to take command of the operations department from Col. Avihu Ben Nun, I brought with me a notebook full of ideas, but my mind was mostly busy with that first-strike idea.
After a year in America I found that the Israeli Air Force of 1977 continued to invest its best resources and brightest brains in finding solutions for the problem of the SAM batteries. My department of operations was busy gathering alternative techniques and supporting systems for the elimination of the Egyptian and Syrian missile arrays. Even Benny Peled mocked their collecting of “thirteen backups for backups” to assure victory over those missiles, but still he signed the chit approving Avihu’s request to develop an additional backup—number fourteen. Every investment was considered legitimate to beat the missiles next time.
The main difference from 1973 was in the argument for attacking the SAMs. Before, the necessity to attack the missiles had grown out of the tactical need to achieve air superiority. But in 1977 the missiles were somehow promoted to a strategic target. Officers in my department claimed with deep conviction that the destruction of the missile arrays would have similar results to Operation Focus, the destruction of the airfields in the Six-Day War in 1967. They thought that the Arab regimes had invested so much in those missile arrays that a fast, elegant elimination of them would be such a defeat that the earth would quake under their feet. For my officers, the missiles were a be-all and end-all, both tactical and strategic assets, and the most worthy targets. It was put in logical terms, but in fact the determining factor was emotional. It was a matter of honor. The air force was conditioned to attack the missiles, and it couldn’t rest until it did just that. It had to avenge Sam Khetz’s death on the same battlefield.
PERSONALLY, I ALSO HATED the missile batteries as much as any of my friends and commanders, but I asked myself if they were really that important. And were we really capable of inflicting a massive aerial blow to enemy ground forces with our fighter force once we finished the SAMs? With an air force consisting of just fighter aircraft, I was far from sure of that.
FIVE YEARS LATER THIS DEBATE came to a head. On the evening of June 9, 1982, I was a brigadier general, commander of the air base at Tel Nof, and was summoned to Tel Aviv for debriefing of that day’s brilliant operation, the complete elimination of a Syri
an array of missile batteries in Lebanon. We finished them off in half a day without a scratch on our planes. The hall was full, and everyone who was anyone was at that briefing.
Like all of us, I felt enormously happy and proud of this achievement. I was even proud personally to show pictures from my Skyhawk bombing sight: a SAM-6 mobile SAM battery, my archenemy since Operation Model in 1973, could be seen under my bombs. And so much did I rejoice in that victory that I ordered preparation of a special emblem of honor, and submitted it in the name of Tel Nof’s pilots to the officer in charge of the operation, Col. Aviem Sela. Since 1974 this man had designed and developed this mission, and his part in releasing the air force from the nightmare was great. When I was invited to the podium, I began by calling Aviem up and awarding him the prize. This was certainly an unusual action, almost pompous. The commander of the air force, David Ivry—who certainly deserved that prize no less than Aviem—gave me a look.
If there ever was a point in which strategic, not just tactical conclusions could be drawn from the elimination of SAMs, this was it. Feeling this way when my turn came to present Tel Nof’s part in the victory, I just skipped the common habit of counting the scalps my base had collected and instead proposed to use our proven capability and eliminate the missile batteries around Damascus.
“The elimination of twenty missile batteries may bring that army to collapse,” I said. “Syria is isolated and loaded with problems. It is like a fragile glass vase; one ping on the right spot can cause it to disintegrate, just as happened to Nasser in 1967.”
I began to suggest that once the bonfires burned around Damascus, the Syrian regime would realize how exposed it was, and this would be a good time to propose a settlement and even begin moving toward a political solution between our states, but I didn’t manage to say much of it. David Ivry stopped me, remarking sourly that this is not what I had been invited to the stage for. He said angrily, “Military officers should stay out of politics!”
ALTHOUGH HE HAD CONFUSED the concepts of strategy with politics, Ivry was certainly right. Had I not been in a state of euphoria, I would have recalled what I kept arguing years before when I was chief of ops, against conventional wisdom: that those were just SAM batteries, not strategic assets. The Syrian rulers probably just blinked in embarrassment when they heard of the destruction of their SAM-6 brigade and the hundred MiGs we shot down that day. It was far-fetched to believe that they would fall from power just because of the destruction of another twenty batteries around Damascus. The missiles and the MiGs were just pawns to them, not treasure. So much for strategy. But the missile elimination proved not to be a tactical achievement, either. The ground war against the Syrians in Lebanon in 1982, however successful it had been, was executed by our ground forces and not the air force. The air force fighters may have helped, but they definitely did not play a decisive part.
Thus, the marvelous elimination of SAMs in 1982, the product of years of investment and the resources of a whole country, was neither strategically nor militarily meaningful. Its meaning was mainly emotional, for us Israeli pilots. The destruction of that missile array was first and foremost an act of pride and revenge. The Israeli aircraft had paid back the Soviet missile for “bending” its wing. Only two good things can be said in favor of this vaunted elimination of the SAMs in 1982: the operation was well planned and well executed. Today we know that these, too, are not obvious.
But there was another reason why Ivry was right to stop my strategic proposals. He probably was already suspecting what we didn’t, that this war was a “war of deception,” a political game that had no long-range, government-approved national plan. None of the military men in that hall could imagine Prime Minister Begin and his government being led by the nose step after step to places they never imagined going. Perhaps Ivry already suspected that we were sinking into activities the government never intended and never approved—deeds that would bring us down in many ways. Perhaps he was thinking of his next moves to keep the air force sane. It made no sense to waste time on strategic proposals in a war that was mainly politics.
SO MUCH FOR 1982; NOW BACK to 1977, to those eighteen months in which I served as chief of operations, until I submitted my resignation and left the military. In that job I didn’t spend my time only on debates for and against missile attacks.
This was an interesting and exciting time, full of crazy fun. The department under me, which was responsible for the planning of all aspects of war, was involved in everything. We dealt with every operation, either day-to-day or long-range. All intelligence data and all the IDF’s programs and secret weapons were open to us. We entertained new ideas, issued new operational demands, developed new battle doctrines, and arranged exercises and war games to test them. Every six months we submitted a situation report that affected budgets, training, and new weapons. We did surprise readiness checks on all air force units. I enjoyed very much scrambling a squadron or a base for simulated battle, day or night, and watching them deal with it. It brought back mountains of lessons. And most interesting of all, we worked in close cooperation with the land and sea arms of the IDF.
I used to devote one day every week to flying. I visited all the fighter squadrons and flew Phantoms, Kfirs, Mirages, and Skyhawks. I got aboard flights in helicopters and transport aircraft, visited our control and radar units, and met with these branches of military aviation totally different from fighters. On such visits I met with officers and pilots and gave them ideas for the future, discussed operational plans and doctrine with them, listened to their reactions, and gathered impressions. I took part in many exercises and learned new ideas that welled from below. I discovered outstanding men and women. Sometimes I was amazed how the air force had come so far from those pioneer days of flight school sixteen years ago, and even since the establishment of the Orange Tails. Notwithstanding my criticism, this was a different air force, clever and purposeful. It was a dynamic world of sophistication, always interesting. I had to stay on my toes all the time.
For example, there were the long-range targets. During the late 1970s the Iraqis were building an atomic reactor, and this threat worried us a lot. We began testing our capability to operate a thousand kilometers from Israel. The independent range of our fighters was much shorter than that. The air force began to develop aerial refueling capability. I started using this new, still limited capability and mandated operational test flights to very distant points, day and night. On one of these tests, formations of Israeli Phantoms and Skyhawks got out to two thousand kilometers, the Italian coast, and returned. I used this opportunity to learn to refuel my Skyhawk in the air somewhere among the Greek Islands. One night we sent Kfir aircraft to the east, to circle targets at their maximum operating range. I spent other long nights flying odd missions to faraway, unnamed places.
And there were the day-to-day, ongoing operations. The air force didn’t rest for a minute. Preparation for those operations, and the meetings and presentations for their approval, always ended in the minister of defense’s office and sometimes in the prime minister’s. Those presentations were challenges in themselves, and one always heard interesting ideas and was exposed to perspectives from new, surprising angles. At times I had the opportunity to take part in such operations as a “front-line manager,” always in a forward command post, either in a jeep, a plane, or on the deck of a ship, following the process closely, ready to intervene and send in air support at any moment. This was a mighty great feeling.
One of those operations—the Litani operation in Lebanon—continued for several days and nights. The air force worked at high capacity, and in that instance I experienced the operation of the air force command post in wartime. Of course, this operation was nothing like the Yom Kippur War, but I was glad to see that this time the atmosphere was different from the stories of confusion that had reigned there during that war. I exploited that Lebanon miniwar to instill and examine correct working procedures—for instance, processing of feedback from the line squa
drons and integration of our conclusions into the next orders being planned. The means we used for it were still primitive—paper maps and intelligent clerks with logbooks and colored pencils—but in essence we created “living maps.”
HELICOPTERS WERE ANOTHER distraction that the new head of operations wasted his precious time on instead of going over the minute details of fighter plans for war that were brought daily to his desk.
I discovered late in life this curious vehicle that could land and take off almost anywhere. But when I joined the operations department I noticed that it could fill some of the more problematic empty squares in my notebook charts. And in this I found a good base left by my predecessor, Avihu Ben Nun, and Benny Peled also had seen the revolutionary military possibilities hidden in helicopters long before I did. Still, the man who most influenced me was Maj. Ido Ambar, the officer who planned helicopters operations under me.
Ido believed that commando units could be flown to an enemy’s rear by helicopters, and attack his weak spots. Such an aggressive approach fit my own thinking. Conditions that disturbed activating fighter aircraft—for example, bad weather or missile batteries—didn’t affect helicopters in the same way. Helicoptered commandos could attack important targets at night and in adverse weather conditions, and enable us to continue the war even when our fighter force was grounded. And perhaps the most important: the helicoptered force would be able to continue the fight even if our airfields were paralyzed.
And there was another good thing: Unlike futuristic unmanned aircraft, helicopters were ripe and ready. Here there was no need for risky technological development. The helicopter squadrons were there to be used and were organized and ready for action. We had large American CH-53 Sea Stallions—we renamed them Petrels—that could transport commando forces with their weapons and gear and put them right on their objectives. Such possibilities were so dazzling that we began imagining a new type of battle unit, mobile, quick, and aggressive, that could be deployed alongside the cumbersome IDF and know how to use the various capabilities of the air force and direct them to a plethora of new targets. This theoretical unit fit into my first-strike concept. We called it in our discussions the Israeli Attack Force.
Loud and Clear Page 38