FROM THE MOMENT I WAS NAMED chief of operations, I began working to restructure orders into tables of who does what and when. The how was a wholly different story, an issue of doctrine and not of plans and orders, and the source of the doctrine in my opinion was not in the operations department but in the air force at large. My department should be only the engine fueling the creation of doctrine. I returned to the way Operation Focus had been prepared. Our orders had served only as guidelines for the field units in order for them to know what to prepare for.
“If we give the fighting units some responsibility for fighting methods,” I told my officers, “they’ll begin to think and prepare, and new ideas will surface.” Of course, I remembered the Baboons.
My men were furious.
“The field units have no general understanding,” some of them said. “Pilots deal with flying, and their knowledge of everything else goes in the slot under our office door.”
“Why not supply them with information?” I asked. “Most of it is not confidential.” But my planners opposed the idea. They were clever and able, and like most people of our kind they preferred to play their cards close to their chests. Also, my directives hurt their aesthetic sensibilities. I had relegated the “art of planning” to a simpler level, replacing colorful and sophisticated crochet with simple cotton checkered blankets.
“We are better off having mediocre fighting methods as long as the pilots understand and believe in them,” I told my planners. “Give the field commanders freedom to manage the details.”
My men didn’t like it.
I TURNED TO THE FIELD commanders. If the problem lay in the disconnection between the brain and the limbs, then the time had come to activate the neurons in those limbs. The method I used for it was “planning exercises.” The operations department mandated to the bases and the squadrons war games, in which we dictated to them a general situation and ordered them to use the tools at their disposal to achieve certain results. No indication was given to them of how to do the job. “Use what you have” was the rule. The units, sometimes competing against each other, had to call in all the expertise they could lay their hands on, open books and maps, and issue plans for their battle. Sometimes those war games included elements of actual execution—arming the aircraft, briefing, taxiing, and even attacking target ranges. This gave their planning a dimension of reality in timing.
At the end of the war games, there was a general debriefing in which the plans were evaluated, and the units’ solutions were compared against each other and against the “teacher’s solution,” which my department prepared clandestinely. There were hot arguments. The bases and the squadrons went deeper into the doctrines, initiated tests of their own, and the staff began to get fresh ideas and solutions to operational problems and had to compete against a smarter opposition.
But the deeper meaning was that the actual fighters—even though they executed the orders—took part in the thought processes and operational responsibility of the air force. There were even some exercises in which I paralyzed headquarters totally in the middle of a war game, and the bases had to continue the war by themselves, coordinating their actions.
In the first war games I met a phenomenon that surprised and repulsed me: some field commanders were not happy with any added work or responsibility. They preferred to receive detailed orders.
“Give us complete orders!” they demanded. “What else is headquarters for?”
I turned a deaf ear, and these voices weakened in time but never ceased entirely. There was another reaction: Benny Peled, who was at the end of his tenure as commander of the air force, was uneasy about this change.
“Are you taking the command away from me?” he kept asking.
David Ivry, who replaced Benny, understood the idea much better.
I STILL ASK MYSELF when the exact moment was that I decided to close my notebook and leave my desk job, since I had concluded that I was becoming a nuisance and should do something else. No doubt this happened when I felt my ideas conflicted with the air force’s ethos and got everyone’s back up.
As long as I wanted to add new, sophisticated weapons to the air force’s arsenal, all was well. But it was much less nice when I began thinking about the future of fighter aircraft. I also agreed that we still needed fighters and that they still were very efficient on some missions. But I could show the empty squares in my chart and argue that fighters were unable to fill them successfully, and thus fewer aircraft were needed.
I raised an idea called “a quality air force”: an air force one-third the size of our existing force but consisting of only super-modern aircraft, such as the F-15. At my request, research compared this model against the existing air force in several war scenarios. The researcher—Dr. Yitzhak Ben Israel, who later became a major general in the IDF—showed that within a framework of identical current costs, such a small and agile force could achieve better results in almost all scenarios. Only one assignment was left open: who would attack enemy ground forces and destroy thousands of tanks? Quality aircraft alone were too few for that. I had designated my imaginary remotely directed drones for that. I wanted us to develop and acquire such weapons using budget from “surplus” manned aircraft. I stepped on a lot of toes.
The prevailing wisdom pointed in the opposite direction, to adding fighter aircraft. Since the Yom Kippur War, the IDF’s command, headed by the chief of staff, Mota Gur, believed that the rehabilitation of the IDF and its preparation for war required massive force enlargement. The IDF and the Ministry of Defense got unprecedented finance and political power after that disastrous war, and used it. Our confidential defense budget—for Israelis, anyway—was discussed freely abroad. I found the numbers at UCLA and in the American press. I found that Israel was spending 30 percent of its national annual budget on defense—twice the expenditure of before the war, and five times other “normal” militarily active nations.
The IDF and the Ministry of Defense wanted to achieve military independence, and with excited assistance from the defense industry they pushed for development and production locally of combat ships, main battle tanks, fighter aircraft, and other projects needing a lot of infrastructure and full of economic risk. Even superpowers could barely afford these risks. Such ventures were hot topics and were protected by special interests. In this atmosphere, to talk about reducing the number of aircraft and developing drones was like swimming up Niagara Falls. The real issue was power—as fast and as much as possible. And power went to those who knew how to direct large streams of government finance into waiting hands. Getting and spending big money was vision, strategy, and leadership.
The need to buy many more fighter aircraft was supported by ground forces, too. They wanted to receive close air support in their war, and for this they needed lots of aircraft.
Professor Amnon Yogev, a colonel and respected physicist, came to me and said, “Spector, here’s the answer: if we give every fighting unit a laser-designating projector, the air force can give close support with accurate bombing.” Amnon was entrusted with laser-directed weapons. Technically, he was absolutely correct: a soldier could illuminate the target with his laser projector. The aircraft could drop a bomb that would home on the laser beam and hit the target. QED.
I told him, “Look, Amnon, you are promising every soldier that a fighter plane can support him in time of need. We don’t have that many aircraft.”
Amnon said, “One of the missions of the air force is to support the ground forces. Buy more aircraft.”
I reminded him that aircraft can’t work under threat of SAM batteries. If this is the way we take, we will have to achieve air superiority. I reminded him that this is exactly what we had promised before the Yom Kippur War, and exactly in this we failed.
“The air force,” I told him, “must concentrate its firepower on quality targets, not chase thousands of calls for support from companies and battalions.”
“Then what do we do, Spector?”
I
didn’t have drones to solve his problem. I told him, “Buy a lot of machine guns and ammunition for your troops, because if they rely on air support they’ll end up facing the enemy with just a laser projector in their hands.”
IDF command was furious with me, and so was the air force.
OF COURSE, I KNEW AT THE TIME that my idea about changing fighter aircraft for drones was ahead of its time. Even I could understand this, and knew that the first smart bombs we developed had not been so smart. But I remembered the leap in quality that air-to-air missiles had made right before my eyes. And one more thing was clear to me: those weapons would improve and their cost of production decline only when we started to mass-produce them. This could be done only by placing orders to industry.
The first chit I signed my first day in office as chief of operations was an order for a thousand glide bombs. A thousand bombs was an unbelievable number, ten times over the original budget that was allocated to this in the annual program. Each bomb was a hundred times more expensive than a normal iron bomb, and this requirement came at the expense of several other important needs. My commanders raised their eyebrows—clearly there was no need of a thousand such bombs to destroy SAM batteries. But since it was against missiles, they approved the requisition. Still, the number I ordered was only one-tenth of the quantity I really wanted because they were intended for more things than just attacking SAMs. I wanted to get those bombs to action to accelerate the tempo of learning and improving them and their use. I wanted to equip all the squadrons with those bombs and begin employing then routinely in training to accelerate the process of getting to the next generation of weapons. I was ready to use those glide bombs in operations at the first opportunity and I almost succeeded, but had to cancel: Yassir Arafat failed to show up at the meeting.
NO DOUBT I WAS TOO PUSHY and impatient as a staff officer. I didn’t consider political correctness, and my commanders were reaching the limit of their patience. In one discussion Benny got out of his seat and yelled at me to stop grinding him down with these ideas, or—as he put it in English—“I’ll shoot you down in flames!” Benny was scary even in English, but he also had warmth and grace. Very early the next morning I was invited to his office. Over the first coffee of the day and the eternal cigarette, clean-shaven and his eyes still drowsy, he conversed with me at length. In the end he sent me to continue with “my craziness.”
David Ivry replaced Benny as air force commander in October 1977. Ivry was extremely intelligent and understood my worldview pretty well, and I believe he even agreed with most of it in principle. But Ivry was a pragmatic person who knew that a heavy ship such as the air force could not make sharp turns. I lost patience. Even though I saw progress in some of my requirements, my main ideas seemed to me as far from fulfillment as ever. I could continue blabbering about “filling empty squares,” “quality air force,” “first strike,” the need to replace fighter aircraft in some missions by helicopter commandos and drones, and the need to decentralize war planning—still, the main product of my department was plans and orders to eliminate SAM arrays with Phantoms and Skyhawks. And the imagination of the air force and most of its energy were invested in its next fighter aircraft. This was a worthy subject for fighter pilots, and many plans and many interests protected it. It was clear to everybody, even me, that the real attention and the real finance would go there, not to any other idea.
The Americans proposed their fighter aircraft, put political pressure on us, and lent us money so we could buy them, and in Israel, heavyweight sectors—our aerial defense industry most of all—pushed for the development and production of an Israeli-made jet fighter. The air force was the client and its word was important, but very few pilots or commanders cared to discuss the deeper question of what was needed, and for what ends. The air force knew what it really wanted—it was an American modern jet—but at the end, the air force reconciled all the competing parties. It convinced the government to buy American F-16s and at the same time voted for the development of the locally produced Lavi, which was going to be practically identical to the American fighter, and even undertook to order both of them. In this way, by the right hand doing the opposite of what the left was doing, the State of Israel was led into a huge double investment, and part of it went down the drain in the end.
During my studies in the United States I learned the interesting notion of the “military-industrial complex”—this integration of partial interests that affects national decisions. Now I had the opportunity to see this phenomenon firsthand—and in my eyes, this whole process was improper, or at least illogical.
‡
INSIDE THE GENERAL OOZE that my ideas were floundering in, my personal break point arrived. I remember clearly where this happened. It was at a convention of reserve pilots at Tel Nof. The reserve pilots, a big part of the power of the air force, were then a focal point of distrust of the high command. Although ready and willing to contribute, serving a day every week, they harbored deep resentment regarding command failure in the Yom Kippur War. The goal of the convention was to strengthen their trust in our plans for the next war. My departmental officers climbed the podium one after the other and presented them with our new, improved plans. When we got to the crux—attacking SAMs, of course—Tsutsik got up in the audience. The big, swarthy man, my instructor in flight school, was now a captain at El Al Israel Airlines. All those years he continued to fly Skyhawks in the reserves—a feat that not all pilots could match. I looked at him with great affection. His temples and his chest hair, sticking above his shirtfront, were already white.
Tsutsik said, “I don’t understand.”
Nahumi began to explain the new methods of attack on the missiles from the beginning.
“Not that,” said Tsutsik. “Don’t you have anything new to show us?”
The audience of reservists supported him with a growing murmur of catcalls. The room became noisy, and all eyes turned to me. I was the senior staff officer, so I got up to the podium to defend our plans and fighting doctrines.
I knew with whom I was dealing here. The people I faced were not cowards. They were ready to risk their lives and enter the missile killing zones once again, and I presumed they saw our plans as practical, but they needed to be convinced of the reason to do it. So I supplied it. I described to our reserve pilots how the elimination of the missiles would change the situation, shake the enemy strategically, and enable us to break his army tactically. I reminded them how after air superiority was attained on June 5, 1967, the sky opened and the enemy lay open to us. I spoke, but I did not believe what I was saying. The convention ended on an up note, but since then, whenever I approved operational plans, I saw before me Tsutsik’s skeptical eyes.
‡
FOR A WHILE LONGER I kept signing operational orders and sitting in on staff discussions, but more and more I understood that the man entrusted with operations cannot be in opposition. For some additional time I kept coming to work with red eyes, and at last I went to David Ivry’s office and asked to be relieved and leave the service. Ivry, a moderate man, tried to calm me down—perhaps a short leave would do—but my feelings were too strong. I had my strategic thinking, but I failed to convince the air force to follow. I knew how to fly, lead, and command, and also to think and write, but I didn’t know politics nor how to say one thing and mean another, and I didn’t care to learn.
“I don’t fit here, and I can’t stay in the air force,” I told Ivry painfully. The conversation ended. When I exited Ivry’s office I thought, “Here’s where we part, my beloved air force. I am leaving you in the good hands of Ivry, Avihu, and others like them.”
It was August 1978. I took off my uniform and left.
I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TIME to mourn this second break in my life. We were poor, and we had to pay the mortgage on our home. We both had to find work, and quickly.
Within a week I found myself picking apples in the orchards of Kibbutz Tsuba, near Jerusalem, the same kibbutz my Uncle Shaike hop
ed to establish before his death. Ali stood like a rock behind my decision and my torment, and worked in the kibbutz kitchen. We came down from the heights of the air force and folded ourselves into the narrow, warm niche of the kibbutz.
Tzuba’s members accepted us very gracefully into their society. We received a small, nice apartment with a bit of lawn in front. The end of summer in the mountains of Jerusalem was sweet and cool. I worked in the fruit orchards, picking, pruning, spraying, and shoveling powdered bird shit on the roots of the trees. Our fourteen-year-old, Etay, learned to drive a tractor, too. Our kids went to live and study in the children’s houses, and while I was in the fields my nine-year-old, Omri, carried six-year-old Noah on his shoulders to the opening of the first day of her first-grade class. Soon we all found new friends, and the children got a dog. Every weekend, friends from the past, from Givat-Brenner or the air force, came to visit us, and we sat on the lawn and peeled cactus fruit, or walked around collecting berries and figs in the deserted Arab gardens on the hilly terraces. I continued flying in the reserves, and every week I drove Ali’s red VW beetle to Hatzor, to fly Phantoms in Aviem Sela’s Falcons as an ordinary section leader. It was nice and calm in Tzuba, the people of the kibbutz were wonderful, and the socialist way of life was still romantic, but we both knew well that this was an intermission. The kibbutz was not the solution to our lives. We recalled Shoshana’s life at Givat-Brenner and my own run-in at the general meeting there, and decided we were not ready to give up our personal freedom. But the days were beautiful, and we lived from one to the next. Shosh came to visit us a few times, to see the grandchildren. I noticed that she was cool to me, and could see in her eyes criticism for my “dereliction of duty,” but I was already in another place and not involved in national security anymore.
In autumn, the fruit harvest season in the mountains, my thoughts flew far with the clouds and the migrating birds. I entertained new career possibilities. I thought about going back to get a Ph.D. in the United States. I sent a letter to UCLA, and to refresh my English I translated a book about American fighter pilots in Vietnam from English to Hebrew. Then I reconsidered. I rejected the idea that I would go back to the issues I had left behind, justifying and formulating reasons for the failure of my main intellectual achievement. Then winter came, and the pruning of the apple and plum trees. The mornings were misty, and the chill air between the rows of bare trees cleaned my lungs gradually of the residue choking them.
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