But the main component was missing: the air force didn’t have commando units. Indeed, the Israeli military had several elite infantry units—all of them full of top-quality soldiers, but they all belonged to other service branches. And whenever in the past the IDF had put infantry with helicopters for joint operations, it had been improvised, since there was no responsible body with unified doctrine and efficient management. During all our wars, commando operations in the enemy’s rear were extremely rare, and the little that was done was usually improvised and amateurish. Only in peacetime, and after long preparation, did such operations succeed. One such case was the hostage rescue at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. But in wartime you don’t have time for such delicate preparations.
The existing elite infantry units were the apple of the eye of the army, and there was no way to get a ready infantry unit from anybody. So we mounted an effort to build a new commando unit of our own from scratch. We wanted an infantry unit that would belong to the air force and be integral with our helicopters.
Simple? No. We found out that we were stepping on the toes of the commanders of the ground army.
“It’s unthinkable,” said the regular army, the “greens.” (The air force was called the “blues.”) “To give the air force permission to build an airborne commando unit. They’ll be drawing water from the same well of first-class recruits. What about us?”
Those greens were ignoring history. Infantry units had operated in other wars under air force command and had had a fair amount of military success (and failure as well). And the navy had a superior commando unit, Flotilla 13, which did dangerous jobs successfully, although it was commanded by officers wearing not green but white uniforms. The reason for this unit was historical. As early as 1941 the Hagana had sent infantry units deep behind enemy lines in boats (remember the mission of the Twenty-three?), and in the War of Independence in 1948 the Palmach was already using PT boats for special operations. In a natural way, maritime commando operations were seen as legitimate from the beginning of the IDF. But the blues were different, since in 1948 they didn’t have helicopters. Nobody had helicopters in 1948, and only visionaries such as British general Orde Wingate had imagined using helicopters in the 1940s. From its inception the Israeli Air Force focused on fighters. This is why no airborne commando force was ever developed.
“So what?” I responded when I grasped the context. “We just missed the first train. Well, 1977 is as good a year as any other to buy a ticket and start this journey.”
I began pushing this idea, too, and to my joy in this matter I didn’t find myself alone. Ido, of course, worked shoulder to shoulder with me, but even the fighter planners picked up on the idea. In the beginning, they certainly saw in it “backup, no; fifteen for missile elimination,” but in time some of them developed a more general outlook. Our voice began to be heard in the corridors of the General Staff. Right then we stepped on real land mines.
Most of the land generals saw in our idea an invasion of their territory, and naturally they reacted vigorously. The paratroopers were insulted more than everybody else. “Why can’t the air force just fly us to the targets and get us back, as we did in the good old days?” they asked. “Why does the air force need an infantry unit under its own command?”
Those operations from those “good old days” had plenty of bad operational examples, and good reasons not to do it that way. When we reanalyzed those improvised operations, we found in them many failures and mistakes, and always there was no integrated command structure to take responsibility and make corrections.
“Why do we need infantry?” we answered the paratroopers. “Because waging war behind enemy lines requires tight coordination of infantry with helicopters and fighter aircraft. This is expertise that must be learned, practiced, and commanded in place. And for this, an organic command structure is needed, to prepare in peacetime and control it in war.” “Opportunistic copulating,” I once told the paratroopers’ commander, “bears only orphans.”
The greens were hopping mad, but the alternative they proposed, taking the helicopters from the air force and putting them under the army, was just a provocation and unrealistic, and they knew it. They got even madder. The new vice chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Raphael Eitan (Raful), vehemently opposed the idea of letting the air force develop a special commando unit for itself. Raful was suspicious by nature, and I believe he had figured out our hidden plans for a future Israeli Attack Force. In one of many staff discussions he labeled me “General Popsky.” This was a ridiculous name taken from a book called Popsky’s Private Army In spite of his rough exterior, Raful was an avid reader.
The chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Mota Gur, didn’t want to take a position on the matter. He also was a paratrooper, and in his last days in command. For some time it seemed we were at an impasse.
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I FIRST MET COL. RAPHAEL EITAN when he commanded Paratroop Brigade 35. This was in the middle of the 1960s. Young Lieutenant Spector, a Super Mystere pilot, was sent south to the Negev, to join a training exercise with the paratroopers. The brigade was training to take some barren hill. I was given a radio, and my job was to direct close air support, what soon became known as a forward air controller.
The brigade commander was short, stout, and tough, his red nose peeling and his face pockmarked under his battered Australian field hat. He took me under his wing and sat me in his jeep. Before us was a rather large hill, its rocky sides mottled with bushes, and on the top were some whitish dugouts. We watched the soldiers advancing in line, running and falling face down. When the sun went down, a break was ordered. The battalion commanders assembled at the brigadier’s tent. I sat among them eating jam from cans with them; they were all legendary figures from my childhood.
In the morning there was another dry fire drill (with no live ammunition), and in the afternoon came time for the live fire attack. We stood, the forward command staff, on another hill. All was spread before us like a chessboard. The soldiers hopped among the rocks up the slope, firing in short bursts and raising squirts of white dust. From our position the shooting sounded like explosions of chains of caps. I saw another group of soldiers climbing the other side of the hill. Suddenly a great fart came from our side—a jeep had launched a round from a black pipe. The smell of burned powder spread, and a second explosion roared in the distance. A pillar of smoke sprouted on the hilltop.
“Loretta,” the commander’s female clerk said to me with a lovely smile.
“Call me Spike.” I clutched her hand warmly. She was only a little chubby, and the upper button of her collar was open. She had magnificent dimples.
“Not Loretta!” She recoiled and pulled her hand away. “Lo reta!” Lo reta in Hebrew means “recoilless.” I still didn’t get it.
“Some cannon,” she snapped. The way she turned away made me see that my chance of her seeing me as a real cannon was over.
The aircraft called me on the radio. They were already circling above us, waiting their turn. They were loaded with napalm. Raful turned to me: “Hit the target, now!”
With my hand on the mike, I scanned the battlefield again. The soldiers were already too close to the top in my opinion, perhaps 150 meters.
“Sir—” I began. Raful turned his back on me.
“Call him ‘Raful,’ not ‘sir,’” advised “Loretta.” I tugged at his sleeve.
“Yes, Spector?”
“The troops must pull back from the target… they’re already inside the safety perimeter.”
Raful threw me a contemptuous look. “The air force is not willing to fight?”
Embarrassed, I shrugged. I brought the aircraft in on a “dry pass.”
“Do not drop any ordnance!” I warned them. I felt the stare of the brigadier burning in my back.
The two Vautour fighters, large and noisy, passed one after the other low over the hill. I saw the soldiers getting up, waving, and applauding. Raful sent me a shadow of a smile. And again the soldiers began to run, firi
ng their rifles.
A messenger came running. The drill was immediately stopped and the soldiers were called back.
“What happened?” I asked my confidante.
“Two soldiers were killed,” she whispered. Apparently someone was caught in crossfire between the two units that attacked the hill. A commotion began. The company commanders came running, got together, and conversed quietly. A command car started its engine in a din of noise and smoke, and drove down to the wadi below us, bouncing in the dust. I saw that it carried stretchers. The forward command group began to fold itself. Blankets, maps, binoculars, and water tanks were thrown in the jeep. The soldiers turned back down the slope. The aircraft still buzzed overhead.
“Sir… excuse me, Raful.”
“What now?”
“Permission to napalm the target hill?”
“Do as you like.”
The Vautours thundered in and loosed their bombs. A boom, and the hill was covered with flames and black smoke. The soldiers froze, then turned around and jumped excitedly and shouted “Bravo!” Chubby sent me a dimpled smile, and Raful shook my hand strongly. His hand was thick and hard, a hand of a farmer.
THIS STRUGGLE TO ESTABLISH my “private army,” which went on for a long time and became nasty at times, found the beginning of its solution from an unexpected direction: the soldiers themselves. One day Ido brought two men in green uniforms to my office. Both of them were big names. Dodik Rothenberg was the hero of the legendary Battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, a bloody battle during the Six-Day War. And Muki Betzer, tall and balding, was one of the most decorated soldiers from Commando Force, the top elite infantry unit. He had taken part in many operations beyond Israel’s borders, including the rescue at Entebbe. Both were heroes and thoughtful men.
Muki said, “Instead of fighting the army over their beloved assets, let’s establish a new reserve unit. It should consist of ex-commando reservists. Let’s train them specifically for air force missions.”
“Are there such things, released commando guys who can fight?” I saw in my mind’s eye flabby, grizzled veterans.
“There are. And they are okay.” Muki seemed to read my mind.
“Who will establish this new unit?”
“Me,” Muki said.
“And who’ll command it?”
“Me.”
Still, I had reservations about this kind of ex-commando fighter. I knew their mode of action. They prepared their operations years in advance, looking for absolute certainty. In fact, they were peacetime soldiers. I told Muki, “In aerial warfare there is no time and no certainty. I need guys who can get an order in the morning, prep till noon, mount helicopters in the evening, and fight at night.”
“They’ll do it.”
I made it certain he understood me: “I want to be able to scramble them to targets like fighter aircraft.”
“Can do.”
“And the same next day?”
“Same next day.”
I was impressed. Only one question remained: “How can I trust you to be at my disposal in time of need? At the first opportunity the greens will steal you for their trenches.” I wanted soldiers wearing blue berets, so it would be clear to whom they reported.
“Blue berets? Not yet,” said Muki. “Let’s go slowly. Let’s begin green, quietly. Later, the greens will get used to it, and finally they’ll give in. Let’s do everything gradually.” Clever Dodik nodded, but I, paranoid as I was, couldn’t rest until we succeeded in squeezing permission from Raful to establish the new unit—“not an air force unit, you hear me, Spector?”—in an air force base. If not under the air force command, at least they would be nearby, under our supervision.
And indeed the “battalion for air force missions”—a vague name was given to it intentionally—began to become a reality. Muki’s reserve soldiers were smart and agile, worked hard, and reported for long months of service. They developed tools and methods that inspired even me, and I was glad to see helicopter and fighter pilots mixing with those commandos routinely. These soldiers and officers were still wearing green berets—it took a long time before they changed to our blue ones—but the language they used began to sound like ours, and I could read their maps. I found myself dragged at night with Muki into all kinds of infantry maneuvers, inserted by helicopter in dark places, driving odd vehicles, and using unfamiliar weapons. On one of my visits in our battalion I saw a familiar back bent over his work. I slapped it, and Brutus the night fighter turned to me, a welding torch in hand. We hugged each other warmly. It came out that he, an engineer by profession, had volunteered to design and build some equipment for the air force’s new commando unit. If Brutus was there, then the whole thing was becoming a seriously scary weapon.
But while I began celebrating the birth of the helicopter commando, an unexpected weakness was revealed. Painfully, that weakness was in the helicopters themselves—the air force end of the deal. The flight profiles were too demanding, and the helicopters didn’t have sufficient instrumentation to ensure safe flight and landing on target. Their instrumentation was antiquated—on a level with the Harvard trainers I had flown in 1958. With such instruments, navigation and spatial orientation at night in enemy territory were difficult at best. The helicopters were capable of doing single, very special operations, like plucking with tweezers, but not the extensive deployments I needed from the commando unit.
In one of the exercises I took part in, a helicopter crashed due to loss of spatial orientation, and the dozens of soldiers aboard survived only by luck. This was really bad; Muki’s warriors knew how to attack the targets we selected for them, but we couldn’t guarantee getting them there in one piece and extracting them safely after the operation. This problem remained unsolved.
OF ALL THE ISSUES I wanted to address as chief of operations, the most important was a lesson I had learned in the Yom Kippur War: the integration of fighting units into the war as “heads,” not just as “hands.”
Air force headquarters, and my department of operations with it, saw themselves as the brains, which processed plans and doctrines and sent them down as detailed orders to the limbs—the squadrons and the air bases. This was exactly the system I was familiar with from my time as manager of one such limb. When I commanded the Orange Tails I became distrustful of this system, and my dissatisfaction grew later, when I headed the aerial training department. It wasn’t about the authority of headquarters to decide what should be done and who should do it. What bothered me was them dictating the method of execution in minute detail, as was the rule in their orders. In short, I was after central control of the what and the when, and for local control of the how.
I could cite many examples of blunders by a headquarters remote from the field that had produced plans such as Challenge—a bizarre doctrine that had sent Khetz and Avihu out to be sacrificed. Headquarters had rejected—without even checking—the idea of arming Mirages with Dagger missiles, and then it didn’t care to attend the debriefing when this force multiplier was successful. Headquarters was too lazy to reevaluate the attack methods against mobile SAM batteries. It didn’t think about the possibility of the Egyptians building bridges over the Suez Canal, nor did it have an answer to that problem. Immersed in its plans for various operazia, headquarters had made serious tactical errors, was not aware of actual weather and lighting conditions, of the performance of the bombs’ fuses. It rejected feedback from the battlefield. The reality the pilots had to deal with in the Yom Kippur War was different from anything the brains expected, but still, imprisoned in its old doctrines and its underground bunkers, headquarters continued to send down to the limbs orders full of errors that one could either fight against or just ignore.
The main problem was that neither the staff officers nor the field commanders were prepared for this. We hadn’t built any systems that would enable our limbs to function when the brain was confused or paralyzed.
And now, when I was part of the brain, I couldn’t avoid the possib
ility that the same problem could recrudesce.
“Uncertainty is basic to war,” I explained to my officers. “And even the newest doctrines and plans that we geniuses are developing now may fail.” This had no organizational solution. Even getting the best people to headquarters won’t help—who do we have more capable and knowable than Avihu, Sela, and the like? It was clear to me that I was no better than they, and in spite of all the improvements we had made, we could end up repeating the same mistakes if war came on our watch. I felt as if I were walking on eggs.
Against this background I changed my view about the orders we were issuing to the fighting units, and saw them just as “thought drills” and not plans to be executed word for word. Any dictation of tactical details was undesirable—it petrified pilots’ brains and impeded independent thinking.
The problem was that at the same time, peacetime operations—with which we were dealing, too—did require going down to minute details. In those peacetime operations there were sensitivities, involvement of commanders and civilians, and there was plenty of time for the planners to invent complicated methods that could be employed and controlled only in peacetime. Those intricate performances succeeded, and the complicated planning, with emphasis on detail, overflowed into the war orders and the operational culture of the force. I was afraid that the war plans my department kept sending down to the units were cooking up for the air force the same surprise that my predecessors had cooked for me.
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