Start-up Nation

air forces are designed like a Formula One race car, the Israeli Air Force is a beat-up jeep with a lot of tools in it. On a closed track, the Formula One’s going to win,” Dotan said. But, he noted, in the IAF, “you’re going off-road from day one. . . . The race car is just not going to work in our environment.”²

The difference between the Formula One and the jeep strategies is not just about numbers; each produces divergent tactics and modes of thinking. This can be seen in the different “strike packages” that each air force constructs for its missions. For most Western air forces, a strike package is built from a series of waves of aircraft whose end goal is to deliver bombs on targets.

The United States typically uses four waves of specialized aircraft to accomplish a specific component of the mission: for example, a combat air patrol, designed to clear a corridor of enemy aircraft; a second wave that knocks out any enemy antiaircraft systems that are firing missiles; a third wave of electronic warfare aircraft, tankers for refueling, and radar aircraft to provide a complete battle picture; and, finally, the strikers themselves—planes with bombs. These are guarded by close air-support fighters “to make sure nothing happens,” Dotan explained.

“It’s overwhelming and it’s very well coordinated,” Dotan said of the U.S. system. “It’s very challenging logistically. You’ve got to meet the tanker at the right place. You’ve got to rendezvous with the electronic warfare—if one guy’s off by a few seconds, it all falls apart. The IAF could not pull off a system like this even if it had the resources; it would just be a big mess. We’re not disciplined enough.”

In the Israeli system, almost every aircraft is a jack-of-all-trades. “You don’t go into combat without air-to-air missiles, no matter what the mission is,” said Dotan. “You could be going to hit a target in southern Lebanon, with zero chance of meeting another aircraft, and if you do, the home base is two minutes’ flying time away and someone else can come and help you. Still, there’s no such thing as going into hostile territory without air-to-air missiles.”

Similarly, nearly every aircraft in the IAF has its own onboard electronic warfare system. Unlike the U.S. Air Force, the IAF does not send up a special formation to defeat enemy radars. “You do it yourself,” Dotan noted. “It’s not as effective, but it’s a hell of a lot more flexible.” Finally, in a typical Israeli strike package, about 90 percent of the aircraft are carrying bombs and are assigned targets. In a U.S. strike package, only the strikers in the final wave are carrying bombs.

In the Israeli system, each pilot learns not only his own target but also other targets in separate formations. “If an aircraft gets hit, for example, and two aircraft split off to go after a downed pilot or to engage in air-to-air combat . . . the other pilots have to take over those targets,” Dotan explained. “You’re expected to do that—it’s actually a normal outcome. About half the time you’re hitting somebody else’s target.”

The differences in the two countries’ systems are most obvious when Israelis and Americans fly together in joint exercises. Dotan was surprised to find, in one such exercise, that American pilots were given a “dance card” that diagrammed the maneuvers the pilot was supposed to use in the fight. “We see that and say, What the hell is that? How many times do you know what the other guy is going to do?” For Dotan, who now is an investor, the American system seems “like going into a trading day saying, ‘Whatever the market does, I’m buying.’ ”

The multitasking mentality produces an environment in which job titles—and the compartmentalization that goes along with them—don’t mean much. This is something that Doug Wood noticed in making the transition from Hollywood to Jerusalem: “This is great because conventional Hollywood studios say you need a ‘projection major’ and you need a ‘production coordinator’ or you need a ‘layout head.’ But in Israel the titles are kind of arbitrary, really, because they are interchangeable in some ways and people do work on more than one thing.

“For example,” he told us, “we have a guy who is in the CG team, the computer-generated-image team, but he also works on clay 3-D models of the characters. And then we’re doing a sequence, and he came up with a funny line for the end of this thirty-second sequence that we’re producing. And I actually liked the line so much I rewrote the script and put it in there. So the CG guy crossed the disciplinary walls and ventured into modeling and into scriptwriting.”

The term in the United States for this kind of crossover is a mashup. And the term itself has been rapidly morphing and acquiring new meanings. Originally referring to the merging of two or more songs into one, it has also come to designate digital and video combinations, as well as a Web application that meshes data from other sites—such as HousingMaps.com, which graphically displays craigslist rentals postings on Google Maps. An even more powerful mashup, in our view, is when innovation is born from the combination of radically different technologies and disciplines.

The companies where mashups are most common in Israel are in the medical-device and biotech sectors, where you find wind tunnel engineers and doctors collaborating on a credit card–sized device that may make injections obsolete. Or you find a company (home to beta cells, fiber optics, and algae from Yellowstone National Park) that has created an implantable artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. And then there’s a start-up that’s built around a pill that can transmit images from inside your intestines using optics technology taken from a missile’s nose cone.