defending, and every now and then one of us was hit by a MiG that appeared out of nowhere.
Hard questions began to be asked: What should we do in a multiparticipant dogfight? Did the solution lie in flying in closed formations? This would reduce our aggressiveness and lessen our results. Or was it massing our forces, too? Should we scramble formations of eight and ten fighters? We didn’t have enough force for this, and we didn’t know how such an armada could be led while in battle. The problem was difficult on all levels.
The idea I brought with me to the Fighting First allowed a pair to separate, but prevented loss of contact between them by introducing a new concept: target specification. The idea was to keep our aircraft together by sending both of them against one target. This idea came to me about a year before, in 1969, thanks to Giora Furman, Yak’s deputy at Hatzor. Furman organized an air force discussion of air battles and assigned me to give a lecture on multiparticipant aerial combat. Furman, the intellectual among us, already knew that if one wants to go deep into a matter one should write about it. I resisted, but he forced me to hand him a lecture written in black and white. I had to think.
First, I had to define what a multiparticipant dogfight was. When did a dogfight become multiparticipant? This was not a simple question; the situation was not defined solely by the number of aircraft. I finally concluded that the answer lay in the level of information: the dogfight becomes a melee when the leader loses his orientation and cannot control the situation anymore. This battle was wholly different from the jousts we knew so well—one against one, two against two, and even a few more. In those limited battles a normal leader could see it all, and control what was happening pretty well, keeping himself above the fray. There he can plan and utilize passing instances with no threat, to employ one of his aircraft to attack and kill.
But a melee is a fight loaded with chance encounters, a boiling soup where opportunities appear unexpectedly. And risks, too. Of course, the example in my memory was the mad dogfight with me and Gordon.
Labeling a serious air battle a “red-hot melee of surprises” revealed to me the need to create “cool bubbles”—intervals with no threat. We had to give the pilots in the melee a chance, even for a moment, when they could be relatively safe and could concentrate on a target in relative calm. This could be achieved through planning how the pair would work together.
For a few days all this churned around in my brain. Then I took to the air and did some training experiments, and finally I presented Furman and Yak with a new idea I called one-target specification. It worked like this: The section leader chose one of the adversaries in the area and defined it as the pair’s target. They both attacked the same target but from different angles. The adversary, trapped in a pincer, would turn to deal with one of them, leaving his six exposed to the other one. The kill should be quick. All through that process—since we both were after the same target—we would be working together. Eye contact would be maintained continuously, and each could clear a MiG off his buddy’s tail and warn him or come to his assistance in time of need. In fact, in this one- target specification method we created a bubble with three objects in it: both of us, and the MiG. Anyone who tried to enter the bubble could be seen, and we would both operate against him in the same way.
“Independent, self-supporting sections in battle,” I told Yak and Furman, “override the issue of the size of the opposing force in the area. Each two-ship section is supposed to fight against any opposing force, in any size, and there is no need to send larger formations. In principle,” I added, “one can describe the proposed method as ‘work in line’: the section shoots one MiG down, then the section shoots down another MiG, and so on. Send more pairs to battle only if you want more kills.”
Target specification was the one plan I drew from my notebook the moment I came to command the Fighting First. On the first day of my arrival I declared it a mandatory battle tactic. My senior officers, Sharon and Epstein, followed suit, and the method was immediately taught in class and aerial training. This was a not simple, inflexible way of fighting, and it required strong aerial discipline. It was so much easier to pursue targets of opportunity. Some of my pilots didn’t like this new method, and called it mockingly “the old bull method.” They had some good theoretical reservations, too, but I stood my ground and warned my pilots that if any section leader’s pair got separated in a dogfight, there would be hell to pay. They had to do it my way, if they wanted to stay in the First. In this way, in an instant, the First changed its fighting stance.
THE PROBLEM OF LAUNCHING air-to-air missiles was a totally different issue.
When I dug into Marom’s safe I found a top-secret document I hadn’t known about, with a report on all the air force’s missile launches against enemy aircraft. The results achieved by the Fighting First’s pilots were very bad, worse than all its sister squadrons. Most of the missiles launched missed their targets.
I was not upset because our missiles missed. My expectations of the air-to-air guided rockets we were carrying beneath our Mirages’ wings were pretty low anyway. The First operated antiquated missiles, even Soviet Atoll rockets we found rusting in the Egyptian munitions dumps at Bir-Gafgafa. The worst thing in my eyes was how my pilots treated them. I found out that most missiles were fired beyond the minimum conditions necessary for a hit. It was as if you shot at a bird without aiming at all. My pilots dumped missiles into the trash. They didn’t respect them; sometimes they didn’t even hide their shooting them lightly without precise aim. They called them “miss-siles,” and some joked about the missile “making like a flare,” just light and noise. I suspected that some of the launches were done just to get rid of the extra drag of the missiles, to blow them out on the first opportunity and clean the Mirage to go in for a cannon attack. Our squadron prided itself on gun kills, which are much more glamorous.
Besides being immoral, such behavior seemed to me dangerously anachronistic. As aerial combat became more and more massive, fast, and lethal, the long, tedious closing to gun range endangered my pilots’ lives. The future clearly lay in air-to-air missiles, which enabled pilots—at least theoretically—to launch from a distance and finish off the enemy in seconds. I was facing a discipline problem.
I gathered the pilots and reminded them of the situational requirements for a successful missile launch, and then announced that this was mandatory in our squadron. No missile could be launched unless the shot fell within the situational envelope: speed, range, angle off, etc. I warned them that if any of them launched a missile out of that envelope, I would wash him out of the squadron.
AND SO, ONE MONTH AFTER I decided to shelve all my plans to change the First, I found myself shaking it up. To the filtering out of a full third of the pilots, I added target-specification tactics and missile-launching limitations. It all fell on them within a very short period, and came as a tough order given today, to be applied tomorrow. It was clear to me that the pilots were feeling some pressure—and they said it to my face, that the squadron knew how to fight well enough before I took over. That was offensive but didn’t surprise me; I knew this squadron well for years. But now it was my call. We were in a war that was accelerating fast toward a peak, and I didn’t have time for a PR campaign. I couldn’t give them any time to adjust. Their criticism would just have to hang fire for now.
Only Ali remarked once, dryly, that I was gradually becoming like Shosh. My mother lived in Acre, a city on the northern coast, where she managed the national academy for merchant marine officers. She was famous for her high hand there.
HARD MEDICAL OPERATIONS don’t always pay off, but on July 10, 1970, I received a small reward for the hard work I had done on my squadron.
We were sent to an integrated battle of two squadrons. The goal was to catch some MiGs. A four-ship division of Super Mysteres from the Scorpions crossed the canal first and began turning for a bombing approach in Egypt. Another four-ship division, of Mirages from the First, followed the Super Mysteres at low level, discreetly.
I had set up a great team for that mission. My wingman was Moshe Hertz, a relatively young Mirage pilot; this was to be his baptism of fire. Menachem Sharon, my deputy, led the second pair, and his number two was Baharav. We went over again the procedures for target specification and the right way to launch missiles. Thirty kilometers inside Egypt, over the Manzala Marshes, we gained altitude and saw the Super Mysteres below us, racing east as planned. The pursuing MiGs came right to us; the battlefield was set.
Right away a four-ship division of MiGs came at us, fast and high. I divided the work between our two sections, and we were ready. I had two MiGs in front of me. Again I divided the work within my own section, and defined one MiG as the target. I sent Hertz up to the “observation position” to gain altitude and be ready to replace me on our joint target while I came in hard under the MiG’s belly. And so, while I was still closing on that MiG,
