Once the buildup began in earnest the results were nothing short of dramatic. According to internationally published figures, between 1973 and 1982 the number of main battle tanks went up from 1,700 (which may have been an underestimate)22 to 3,600; armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) went from 3,000 to no fewer than 8,000. Of those about one-quarter consisted of the new M-113Æs,23 meaning that Israel now had a truly mechanized army instead of one that was merely motorized, as previously. The old Super Shermans were finally discarded, and the ground forces received additional M-60 tanks of the most advanced model. They in turn were joined by Israeli-made Merkava tanks (for details, see Chapter 15), as well as additional T-54, T-55, and T-62 tanks, which had been captured during the war and reconditioned.
In keeping with the diminished status of the tanks the artillery if anything benefited even more, the total number of barrels rising to 2,000 or so.24 The M-107 and M-109 guns that had been available before 1973 were joined by Israeli-made 155mm pieces, some U.S.-made M-110 heavy 203mm pieces, and multiple rocket launchers ranging from 122mm to 290mm in size. Still not content, the IDF paid its enemies the compliment of imitation by purchasing modern TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) and Dragon antitank missiles. They replaced the old junk, thereby providing Israeli infantry with an effective antiarmor capability that could be deployed from the top of light vehicles or, if necessary, by small groups moving on foot. As numbers of U.S. M-16 rifles arrived and the production of the Israeli Galil gathered steam, for the first time in history all IDF troops could be issued first-rate personal arms. Finally, the engineering corps received new equipment such as bridge-laying tanks and minefield crossing systems.
The IAF’s order of battle, which in 1973 was somewhat more than 400 first-line combat aircraft, expanded to almost 700. Previously the most powerful platform had been the F-4 Phantom, allegedly the best fighter-bomber ever built; for all its speed and ordnance payload, however, it was difficult to maintain, heavy, and, owing to its lack of maneuverability, not really suitable for air-to-air combat. Now the Phantoms were supplemented by growing numbers of the nimble new Kfirs, the Israeli-built version of the French Mirage V to which several refinements had been added. By the early eighties, though, pilots considered having to fly the Kfir almost as an insult. Instead all eyes were turned to the new generation of U.S.-built F-15 fighters and F-16 fighter-bombers. Introduced in 1977, their maneuverability and electronics (i.e., target-acquisition and weapon-guiding capabilities) outclassed anything the Arabs had; when the first arrived, Chief of Staff Gur went on record as saying that “a state with F-15’s no longer resembles one without them.”25 To help these aircraft locate and track opponents the IAF received six EC-2 Hawkeyes, a U.S.-built airborne electronic warfare (AEW) platform to which the Arabs also had no answer. Properly integrated into the chain of command, it was to prove very effective during the Lebanon War.
These aircraft were joined by two different types of TOW-carrying helicopters, the AH-1G/S Cobra and the lighter MD-500 Defender. The former in particular was a highly specialized antitank platform. It formed part of the IAF and was not part of the ground forces as in many other countries; it constituted the IDF’s very first line of defense in case of attack. During the October War the IDF had carried out a small number of heliborne raids against various targets, including Syrian bridges (to delay the Iraqi expeditionary force) and Egyptian communications centers.26 For this mission as well as to increase its capacity for carrying out large-scale airborne operations, U.S.-built CH-53 helicopters joined the old French Super Frelons in 1974 to provide additional lift for troops. Traditionally the IDF had trusted its air force to maintain air superiority and consequently neglected its antiaircraft defenses. Now this shortcoming was corrected to some extent by purchasing multiple-barrel Chaparral guns and Redeye missiles, both of them U.S.-manufactured and intended for close-in defense of military targets.
At sea, the navy’s missile boats had proved themselves in the October War. During the seventies the older Saar I-class boats were withdrawn and replaced by the larger Saar II and Saar III class. Later these in turn were joined by no fewer than nine of the newer Reshef class, bringing the total number up to a very respectable nineteen. Not only did the Gavriel missile give birth to the Mark 2 and Mark 3 missiles (with larger warheads, better electronics, and longer ranges), but it was joined by the U.S. Harpoon and the Israeli Barak—the former an over-the-horizon surface-to-surface missile and the latter a vertical-launch missile intended for antiaircraft and antimissile defense. In addition the navy provided some of its ships with formidable, radar-controlled, 20mm Vulcan-Phalanx guns, enabling them to shoot down sea-skimming surface-to-surface missiles. Finally, although it still did not amount to much, sea-to-shore operating capability was reinforced by the purchase of two hovercrafts.
As before, the navy and IAF were manned largely by professionals, the latter in particular in a state of hair-trigger readiness suitable for a country whose main enemies were only minutes away by air. Not so the ground forces, which also as before, continued to consist very largely of reservists. To ensure that the reserve units would reach the front as fast as possible several changes were made. To correct the deficiencies in maintenance and preparation the new Inspectorate for Maintenance was set up in 1975 and took over responsibility for the YAMACHim. Besides being much larger—they now contained stores and ammunition for many more days of fighting—the depots were better organized as the gradual introduction of computers improved inventory control. Another reform was the introduction of the so-called dry storage system, which meant that in the future precious hours would not be wasted greasing the tanks or finding batteries for those that would not start. Many additional trucks and tank transporters were purchased, thus if war came the tanks, self-propelled guns, and APCs would not have to reach the fronts on their tracks. Though the mobilization of civilian transport in an emergency could not be entirely dispensed, its importance was greatly reduced. The so-called Blue Band trucks, which in previous wars had done their best to follow the troops, all but disappeared.
As we saw, from 1936 on, volunteers and even entire units from countries as far away as Iraq and Morocco had taken part in various Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless neither the IDF nor its air force ever developed a true long-range striking arm capable of acting against the countries in question, contenting itself with interdicting enemy forces on their way to the front. As a result, when an El Al civilian airliner was hijacked to Algiers in 1969 the possibility of mounting some kind of rescue operation came up but had to be rejected for want of means.27 And when the Egyptians closed the Straits of Bab al Mandeb during the October War, Israel was unable to respond. For a time it stood helplessly as its supply of Iranian oil was cut.
With this bitter lesson learned, during the next few years much was done to correct the problem. The old squadrons of DC-3 Dakota and Nord Atlas transports remained in service. However, the backbone of the service was formed by modern C-130 Hercules transports, with much greater range and payload. For flying missions to friendly countries the IAF had long possessed some old Boeing 707 passenger aircraft. Now a few of them were converted into tankers and provided with air-to-air refueling systems; others were modified to serve as flying command posts for ground troops, and others were adopted for intelligence-gathering purposes. Had it been up to Peres, always something of a visionary, Israel would have asked the United States during the mid-seventies to provide surveillance, reconnaissance, and early-warning satellites. However, Rabin in his memoirs claimed he saw no need for such hardware and accused the minister of defense of not knowing what he was talking about.28
The worth of the IDF’s newly acquired long-range capability was put to the test for the first time in July 1976 when an Air France airliner on its way from Athens (its previous stop had been Tel Aviv) to Paris was hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda. Once on the ground the Ugandans allowed the non-Israeli passengers to go free; ninety-eight Israelis and the French crew were mad
e to stay behind and then herded into the old terminal. After a few days’ debating whether a military option even existed, the Israeli Cabinet decided to act. Fortunately information about the airfield was available from Israelis who had participated in its construction, and intelligence as to the hostages and the way they were guarded was provided by Mossad agents on the ground. On the night of July 2 four Hercules aircraft loaded with commandos took off from Sharm al-Sheikh and headed south, flying over Ethiopia on the way to Uganda. Approaching Entebbe, they apparently used electronic warfare to trick airport control29—the details are still classified—and landed, taking Idi Amin’s troops totally by surprise.
As a command-and-control aircraft circled overhead, the commandos, preceded by a black Mercedes brought in to mislead the Ugandan guards, stormed the terminal, shot the hijackers dead, and liberated the hostages. Thirty minutes after it had landed, the first Hercules, carrying the hostages, was back in the air. The others remained a little longer, the commandos systematically shooting up the airport’s control tower and blowing up the Migs of Uganda’s air force so they could not pursue. During the return the transports landed in Nairobi, where they were refueled. Carried out at the cost of one dead and one wounded among the commandos (three hostages were also killed, and another who had been in hospital was later executed by the Ugandans), the operation was a brilliant success. When the heroes returned, people welcomed them by dancing in the streets—not just because the hostages were safe but because it was felt that the IDF had reasserted its superiority.
In May 1977, elections took place. For the first time in Israel’s history Labor was defeated, the upshot being the emergence of a right-wing nationalist coalition with Menachem Begin as prime minister. Having joined the Cabinet as a minister without portfolio on the eve of the 1967 war, the former ETSEL commander had resigned three years later in protest of Ms. Meir’s announcement in the Knesset that Israel might be prepared to give up some of the Occupied Territories. Since then he had systematically opposed the various separation-of-forces agreements with Egypt and Syria, denouncing the government for weakness. Now this man, with the glowering eyes and old-fashioned manners of a would-be Polish aristocrat—only a few weeks earlier Rabin had described him as an “archaeological exhibit”—found himself heading the country and its formidable fighting machine.
Begin’s minister of defense was Ezer Weizman, now in his fifties. Having masterminded the propaganda campaign that brought Begin’s Likud Party to power, on the surface Weizman remained as hawkish as ever; underneath he may have already started his slow evolution into a moderate dove. Certainly he had no use for the mystic-religious arguments that, at least to Begin and even more so to his coalition partners, belonging to the National Religious Party constituted the rationale behind the demand to retain all of Erets Yisrael; instead he was at one with the defeated Labor Party in regarding the Occupied Territories in almost purely strategic terms. Entering office, he was taken aback by the enormous growth of the IDF since he had doffed his uniform in 1969. Later he continued the accelerated buildup of the army as well as Israel’s defense industries.
Militarily speaking perhaps more important than the substitution of Weizman for Peres was Eytan’s replacement of Gur. In 1956 both of them had been battalion commanders under Sharon; since 1973, when his division had absorbed the first Syrian offensive on the Golan Heights, Eytan had served first as CO Northern Command and then as head of the General Staff Division. Like Gur he was and is a soldier’s soldier: blunt, thorough, and obstinate to the point of mulishness. He was also not without a certain sly sense of humor, a quality that enabled him to form a good rapport with common soldiers and, later, voters. Before his appointment he had been famous for his curt and clipped speaking style. Now he developed a loquacity that caused Begin to label him—in all seriousness, it seems—the new Demosthenes.
As the Entebbe raid proved, some IDF services and units were as good or better than ever, capable of extremely rapid planning followed by equally decisive, precise action. This probably did not apply to the entire army, however, given that its breakneck expansion had resulted in internal changes. In 1987, something of the nature of these changes came to light following the publication of what came to be known as the Wald Report. Emmanuel Wald was a former infantry NCO who had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in systems analysis from an American university. Commissioned into the IDF as a colonel, he worked for the manpower division but soon got into trouble with his superiors and was put into the freezer by being moved to the National Defense College. There he wrote his report on the basis of classified documents obtained by somewhat unconventional means (at the time there were rumors that he had persuaded a female soldier to let him into the office of the chief of the planning division). Its publication caused a furor in the military and among the public, which wanted to believe that the IDF was still the best army in the world.
According to Wald, between 1973 and 1982 the IDF had become increasingly cumbersome. The combat echelon’s share in the ground forces’ order of battle dropped by 6 percent, from 35 percent of the total to 33 percent; by contrast the number of overhead slots rose by 33 percent. Of every 100 regular ground slots added, 50 were allocated to logistical and administrative services, 16 to the headquarters and units dealing with force construction, and 8 to the General Staff—against only the 24 that were left for the combat forces proper. The structure of the officer corps was also being altered as the number of lieutenants dropped and that of more senior officers—particularly captain to colonel—increased.30 Thus the essence of Wald’s findings was that the IDF was becoming bloated and top-heavy with supernumerary senior commanders. In addition he described organizational confusion and duplication of responsibilities among various headquarters, particularly in the ground forces. At the time they were made, his charges were furiously denied and the author came close to trial for the unauthorized use of classified material. Yet subsequent statements by several chiefs of staff lead one to suspect that he was right and his critics wrong; indeed, one source has it that by 1996 the percentage of IDF manpower serving in combat units was down to 20 percent.31
In part the changes may have been due to the very great infusion of modern weapons systems and other technologies during those years. This led to the growth of logistic and maintenance echelons as well as increased specialization, rotation of personnel (“churning”), and the fragmentation of careers that became increasingly dissimilar to each other (e.g., one brigade had five commanders in six years).32 In part it was the result of numerical growth. Whereas previously everybody had known each other, now there probably took place a decrease in tacit understanding. This in turn made additional organization necessary; in particular, the increase in the size of the General Staff is explained by the fact that the IDF during these years set up an entire series of new inspectorates for maintenance, intelligence, administration, and replacements, among others.33 Reduced cohesion, greater size, and more technology were slowly making the IDF more cumbersome and less flexible.
In other ways, too, breakneck expansion probably led to a drop in quality. To bring in additional troops Peres and Gur had scraped the bottom of the manpower barrel, reclassifying personnel who had previously been regarded as below par. Eytan in turn went farther still, taking up Ben Gurion’s old view that the army was not merely a military instrument but an educational institution with duties toward society at large.34 Accordingly he decided to start conscripting marginal youths and even petty criminals with the intent of reforming them and teaching skills useful in civilian life. As in the case of Robert McNamara’s infamous and failed Project 100,000 (which used the military to help underprivileged youths), the experiment resulted in disciplinary problems from drug abuse to threats toward superiors.35 After Eytan left office it was quietly dropped, and the money raised through voluntary contributions was diverted to other purposes such as general soldiers’ welfare.
On the face of things the officer selection and training system remained
the same. Though a second school for cadets was opened, the great majority of officers were still selected from among the more successful conscripts, put through various tests, and sent to officer school, after which they would specialize by branch and service. Yet wishing to get more officer for the time and money spent—in other words, to increase the period of commissioned service relative to the period of preparation and training—it was decided to make cadets sign on for an additional year as a condition of acceptance to officer school. Heralding a change in the significance of conscription—those willing to become officers were being penalized—the new system was initially resisted. During the mid- to late seventies a shortage of junior officers developed; in a country where parents had traditionally taken pride in their children being commissioned it became necessary to punish soldiers who refused to attend officer school.36 Later this problem was corrected as officer salaries were raised—one explanation behind the sudden drop in the number of lieutenants and the rise in the number of captains. Even for those who did not intend to stay in the military, signing on for another year became an acceptable way to save some money in preparation for going to university or starting a career.
At a higher level, the combination of war losses and rapid expansion naturally meant additional opportunities for promotion. The average age at which officers occupied their designated slots dropped still farther—not necessarily a good thing for an army where officers were already younger than almost everywhere else, probably leading to a drop in quality.37 Thus in the United States an officer would probably get his first battalion (or equivalent) at the age of thirty-seven or so after having gone through command and general staff college; IDF battalion commanders were appointed in their late twenties often without having spent a year attending POUM (Pikkud U-mateh, the IDF Command and General Staff College). An officer might command a brigade while in his early to mid-thirties, a division short of forty, and—unless promoted to major general and thus to a seat on the General Staff—be out at forty-two or forty-three when colleagues elsewhere were yet lieutenant colonels. As long as they did stay in the army, officers’ time was spent fighting guerrillas along the borders and terrorists inside the Occupied Territories. Consequently officers never had the time to reflect and study; indeed their careers were over almost before they began.
The Sword And The Olive Page 35