hadn’t found a good answer to one tactical question: how to destroy SAM arrays. But the government of Israel, which didn’t bother with policy and strategy and never thought to find solutions to problems within itself, was shocked to find out that the only service provider they ever contracted—the IDF—suddenly couldn’t answer a question. Ezer Weizman, a political figure of influence and a military authority, interpreted this failure of ours in universal, almost apocalyptical terms—“the missile has bent the aircraft’s wing”—and we were all moved. The national discussion turned into tactical babble about which was stronger—the airplane (ours) or the SAM missile (supposedly theirs). And what was not said, but implied, was even more horrible: the victory of the SAM batteries created a psychological image of an unstoppable steamroller coming toward us.
In this way the government of Israel, on August 8, 1970, faced the Egyptian challenge with empty hands and chose to lower its eyes.
We, the soldiers, suffered feelings of personal failure, even guilt. We had failed militarily, disappointed our nation. And since the elimination of the SAM batteries was given exclusively to the Phantom squadrons, the Phantoms’ failure brought about the collapse of a whole tower of expectations. The air force’s then deputy commander, Benny Peled, known for his sharp tongue, summed it all up this way, “The knight in the shining armor has been knocked off his horse.” Those feelings of failure and guilt were stamped deep into the fabric of the air force, and affected its thinking and actions in the coming decade.
LET US GO TO THE PROBLEMS that caused our knight in shining armor to fall on his arse. It is important, since this experience defined the Israeli Air Force and all the characters in our story for years.
First, the War of Attrition had been more or less static on the ground. Soon, the emphasis passed to a vigorous air struggle, dogfights, air-to-ground attacks on the front and in the enemy’s rear, as well as airborne intelligence missions. This brought about a showdown between our aircraft and the SAMs. Destruction of the SAMs was necessary to give us freedom of flight—air superiority—over our operational areas, and to enable us to provide close ground support. In the first two years of the war, the burden was borne by the remaining aircraft from the Six-Day War, supplemented by light attack A-4 Skyhawk fighters purchased from the United States.
Then, in September 1969, the first four Phantoms landed in Israel. The F-4 Phantom was the masterpiece of American military aviation, and its arrival brought with it very high expectations. Almost immediately the Phantoms were integrated into the fighting, and soon they took part in all fighter missions. Then elimination of Egyptian SAM batteries was allotted only to Phantoms. Then the SAMs were being deployed in greater numbers and began to be integrated into denser and wider arrays. New missiles and radar were supplied by the Soviets, and soon some batteries were operated by blond, blue-eyed soldiers.
All in all, this mission took about fifty Phantom sorties. Five Phantoms were shot down in those fifty flights, and two more were badly damaged and returned by sheer luck. This is a rate of loss of one aircraft per every 8.3 sorties, or in military jargon, a 12 percent dropout rate. Such a dropout rate—three times higher than in Operation Focus in 1967—is unacceptable in a prolonged war. Simple arithmetic shows that our newly acquired Phantom force lost 15 percent of its machines against the SAMs in a month.
Indeed, the Phantom failed in its war against the SAMs: it didn’t find a way to hit without getting hit.
WHY WERE THE PHANTOMS getting so badly torn up?
As a generalization, an aircraft that flies in a SAM-defended area must choose one of two optional flight profiles, each with its own advantages and defects. The first is low-level flight. This profile is relatively immune to detection by the missiles’ radars but vulnerable to the manually operated antiaircraft guns. And the second profile is high flight, which is diametrically opposed. Of course, the choice had to be based on estimation of which threat was more serious at any given moment.
Until 1969, the Israeli Air Force believed in coming in low to surprise the enemy, and this profile worked well for us in Operation Focus. From experience we learned what cost (dropout rate) we could expect. It all changed when the Phantom crews returned from their training in the United States. Khetz, Avihu Ben Nun, and their comrades came back with the opposite preference after learning that high flight was used successfully by the Americans in Vietnam. This flight profile was chosen by our Phantom squadrons over Egypt, and indeed, not one Phantom was damaged by ack-ack. But the toll of six Phantoms lost to missiles put this decision in question. Perhaps the conditions in Egypt were different from Vietnam, or perhaps not everything they understood about Vietnam was totally correct. In any case, replicating this method in our own war was going badly.
There was still a last hope for the high flight solution: electronic warfare gear. These top-secret containers were supposed to nullify the SAMs’ radar efficiency altogether. They were rushed from America, taken out of their boxes, and hung on the Phantoms in haste by incompetent technicians (no one had time to train and test them) on the eve of Operation Challenge. The theoretical performance of these instruments—as presented by the American experts—led to the flight tactic that caused my friends’ and my own dismay. No one in our air force really knew how this equipment would perform or had tested it before. It was a matter of blind faith. But at the end of the day it turned out that this equipment was not appropriate for a new kind of Soviet SAM radar (SAM-3) that had just been introduced into Egypt and was unknown in Vietnam. Low-level flight might reduce the toll, but Khetz, Avihu, and their crews flew in like ducks over a hunters’s blind. Operation Challenge failed totally, and the fact that only Khetz’s plane was shot down there was sheer luck.
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED had our Phantoms flown to attack the SAMs at low level using an evasive approach, as in the Six-Day War, instead of arriving head high, like Sir Lancelot?
Any answer to “what if?” must be speculative. But still there is a rational, methodical analysis, called operational research. If it did not exist, how could we plan anything for the future? This method begins with laying down hypotheses, then running scenarios using all the data we have at our disposal, getting quantitative results, and finally deriving conclusions. The good thing about this method is that everyone can check the results. In fact, this is the way science works.
So when we assume that our Phantoms attacked the SAM batteries at low level and using evasive approaches—a profile we have good data about—we find that along those fifty sorties we suffered just two losses instead of six. Had we flown this way, clearly the weight of attrition would have been different.
But that’s only tactics. Let us look one step beyond the field of view of the Phantom commanders. What about the handling of the air force? What would have happened, for example, had Gen. Moti Hod decided to deploy all the weapons in his arsenal, and not just the Phantoms, against the SAMs?
Aside from its 30 Phantoms, the IAF had 163 other operational fighters (45 Mirages, 82 Skyhawks, and 36 Super Mysteres and Vautours). All these 163 planes were fast jets capable of carrying bombs and attacking ground targets. In fact, they were attacking all the time, and were attacking SAM sites until early 1970. They all had weapons and methods that worked. Nobody is arguing that the Phantoms were more modern and much better in attack than the other aircraft, but their value was well above zero. These other aircraft were less effective than the Phantom, but they had worth, too. If their chances to destroy a target were lower, more sorties could be ordered. There were always a number of sorties that would equalize the chance to achieve the mission with the Phantoms. You only have to consider what price you pay for these additional sorties. This was an easy calculation. We have reliable data about their vulnerability.
So the same results achieved by 50 Phantom sorties would have been achieved by 95 sorties of the whole lot. This is 45 more sorties, and we still would lose 6 aircraft (according to simulations: 2 Phantoms and 4 others). The same? Not at all! The burden now is shared among 10 squadrons and 190 aircrews, rather than by 2 squadrons with 30 crews. The loss of half an aircraft per squadron is far easier to accept.
Had this been the case, the Phantom wouldn’t have been toppled and certainly not the air force. Had we met the Egyptian challenge of August 8 in this way, I don’t think the Israeli government would have lost its nerve afterwards.
WHEN I WAS PROCESSING the alternative above—this was done long after—I asked myself, “How could it happen that the IAF gave that super-critical mission to just 30 Phantoms, and 163 good fighter aircraft pilots were left on the sidelines, watching their friends get cut to pieces?” I have some assumptions of my own. Here is the first: the air force command didn’t see the War of Attrition as a decisive war, but as a linear series of operations, one following another (this fits in with the general perception in Israel of this forgotten war). Accordingly, our command took every mission singly, and gave it to their best problem solver, which in the case of the SAMs was
