instructions and orders. I was witnessing the birth of a new sort of opposition group wholly different from the one I had been part of as a young pilot in the Scorpions. Indeed, the Orange Tails’ opposition was as sarcastic as any other and could scoff and criticize, but this opposition invested less energy in young pilots’ friendly manner, often mistaken for esprit de corps, and instead learned to think clearly and speak truth to power. This informal group, which during the Yom Kippur War would call itself “high society,” buoyed up our squadron in the hard days fast approaching.
I saw knowledge and capacity increasing around me, and in myself a new way of knowing, much more refined and delicate than how to fly the Phantom or lead a formation in a dogfight. Command of men began to work itself out through my fingers, and sometimes I needed to suppress a surge of joy when I saw there was no need to pressure them anymore. They knew by themselves. Young leaders stuck out in the squadron, took on leadership roles, and showed me they did things correctly on their own. A group of leaders was growing under me, and they pulled the whole bunch forward. I was there, watching.
17
Baboons
THERE WAS ANOTHE IMPORTANT THING without which it is difficult to understand how the Orange Tails fought the Yom Kippur War. This was the course for advanced aerial leadership, the BBN course. No, not that other course, at Ran Pecker’s Bats. This time I am talking about the new course, the one I ran at the Orange Tails.
WELL, NOT JUST MY FRIENDS and I remembered that outstanding course we had with Ran on the eve of the Six-Day War. Somebody at air force headquarters remembered it, too, and sent out a feeler to find a squadron that might be ready to prepare and run something like that.
I looked around. No one volunteered. This was the beginning of 1973. We still were in a tense cease-fire with the Egyptians and the Syrians, with frequent violations, and we all sensed war and were preparing for it. We trained day and night. New equipment kept coming and we had to integrate it. All the squadrons were tense and loaded with work. We in the Orange Tails were tense, too, perhaps even more so than all of them.
I hesitated. My Orange Tails, a green squadron from the remote base at Hatzerim, was hardly the obvious choice to host and run such a high-level course. Our squadron was built on very young aircrews and ground crews —kids, really. It lacked a spine of veterans and the deep culture that typified all the other squadrons. Although the senior pilots of the Orange Tails had good operational experience, none of us had spent the War of Attrition flying the Phantom, and we couldn’t point to any reserve of exclusive knowledge. The Orange Tails was closed within itself in the Far South, learning feverishly to fly and fight, learning to become a true squadron, ripening from the inside. Senior commanders seldom visited us and hardly ever flew our planes. We were virtually unknown to the air force at large. No senior commander in the air force—except for our base commander, perhaps—suspected the quality that was growing here.
Even I didn’t see myself as the best choice among my peers. Certainly I was nothing like Ran Pecker, a natural-born leader who radiated charisma wherever he went. True, I had good battle and command experience, but mine was definitely not outstanding in my age group. Those who commanded two of the other three Phantom squadrons actually had taught me to fly at flight school. Other squadron commanders were sent by the IDF to study, mature, and get academic degrees in economy, social sciences, and engineering. All I could present on my side was a nice record of MiG kills.
I don’t know what made me raise my hand. I knew that when I returned home to the Orange Tails my second-in-command, Gordon, would be furious. I raised my hand, perhaps, just because nobody else did. And this was likely the reason why I was entrusted with the job.
THE CHIEF OF TRAINING at headquarters set the time frame for the course, and handed me the list of trainees who were to report to the Orange Tails in April for a three-month stay. I knew most of them. They were ten interesting men, assembled from all the fighter squadrons. They all were good and experienced fighters, but three of the pilots had never flown the Phantom before. Thus another subproject was added, to transition to the Phantom and prepare them before the beginning of the course. All throughout March 1973 we got forty sorties into each of them, doing some of it in Refidim, while the Orange Tails was stationed there in readiness. Some clown from the opposition invented a name for the three old rookies preparing for the BBN: Baboons. This nickname stuck to all the other trainees of the course who showed up in April.
As I mentioned, there were no clear instructions as to curriculum. I began wandering around the air force and drawing ideas from here and there. Everywhere I found the stardust trail of my predecessor, but almost no practical suggestions. At last I had an idea, and I sent a short letter to the operations department at headquarters, with a suggestion: “What about using the course for analyzing some practical problems for you, and then testing the solutions in the air?”
This, finally, was an interesting suggestion. Soon I was invited to Tel Aviv, and ops loaded me up. Lieutenant Colonel Yossi from the training department came ready with an allocation of the gear for such experiments, flight hours, munitions, dummy targets, flares. When we had reached some conclusions and the meeting was about to end, we all stood up to go, and a thing that had been bothering me for some time came up.
“Perhaps it might be a good idea to test new concepts against SAM batteries?”
The operations department’s officers shook their heads. This was deemed unnecessary. During the three years since Sam Khetz had been shot down, the air force had developed a new method for attacking SAMs with fighter aircraft. The elimination of the SAMs had become the most important mission of the IAF. Air force headquarters and all of us had put in a lot of effort to figure out how to destroy Soviet SAM batteries. The method of attack changed, and the air force returned to low altitude—exactly as I had demanded from Khetz before his death—with reliance on basics and not just the electronic warfare devices he kept developing and purchasing.
But the air force didn’t adopt the small unit approach I proposed, which centered on penetrating to the targets from various directions and in small groups, independent and free-moving. The approach was still frontal, based on large numbers of aircraft coming in waves from one direction, right into the teeth of the enemy. The weight was supposed to crush the enemy, overwhelm his firepower. The idea was to ensure that at least part of the attacking force would reach the target and destroy it. It was a complicated method, and the whole air force trained and tested it in huge flying drills, employing hundreds of aircraft. The process was very similar to the run-up to Yak’s Operation Focus, but with many more aircraft.
In the end, all the battle plans were prepared according to this method and became operational orders sitting in all the squadron safes: Operation Defy to eliminate the Egyptian missile arrays, and Operation Model to do the same in Syria. They both were huge, very sophisticated, and complicated plans, too sophisticated and complicated in my opinion (I called them mockingly operazias). And they were based on the supposition that the enemy’s SAM batteries would be in their last known sites, the way enemy planes had obligingly waited for us on the runways in 1967, during Operation Focus.
I said to the officers at ops, “I hear there is a new weapon to deal with mobile SAM batteries. They are called SAM-6s, if I am not mistaken.”
They glanced at each other and back to me. This was secret intelligence, but available at my command level.
“True,” they finally replied, “there were new releases about this in the Soviet Union. So what?” The SAM-6 was still viewed as something exotic. There were many other exotic weapons in the Soviet arsenal.
“There were indications that a few of them might have turned up in Syria as well.”
“Possibly. They get a lot of material from the Soviet Union.”
“Well,” I asked, “suppose some of them turn up in our area?”
I SHOULD EXPLAIN. The SAM arrays we were familiar with until then, types SAM-2 and SAM-3, were stationary batteries. That is, the enemy could move them from one place to another, but very slowly; it took days. In this situation we had no difficulty finding out where they were at any given time. Enough time to photograph the
