area—the Fighting First did it regularly—and the new SAM deployment was there on film. The locations of the batteries were fixed for the rest of the day. Under such conditions you could plan attacks on them. Although stationary arrays could kill you, too, attacking them was still a reasonable option. You flew to the target and bombed the hell out of it. Braving enemy fire and taking the hill is part of a soldier’s job, isn’t it?
But the situation is very different when the threats are mobile, and you enter the enemy killing zone without any notion of where that hill is. You can photograph, but even while you look at the pictures the deployment has changed. The SAM-6 mobile missile batteries were mounted on vehicles, and could move from one location to another in a short time. With such batteries, the area becomes an unknown array of threats. In short, if there really were SAM-6 batteries, all our current doctrine—which was based on the lessons of the War of Attrition—had become obsolete. Defy and Model would be thrown to the winds with all the investment in time and energy. All our plans had to be rewritten, training changed, and more. Everyone in the room knew that.
THE CENTRAL FIGURE who had prepared the air force for the onrushing war was Lt. Col. Avihu Ben Nun. Avihu was entrusted with the planning of fighter operations in the operations department at IAF headquarters. He was a serious guy, and he mandated a series of drills of SAM attacks for the whole air force.
Avihu, one year my senior, had been Sam Khetz’s second-in-command during the Phantom project in the United States. When they came back from their training, Avihu established the second Phantom squadron, the Hammers, and commanded it in Ramat-David. Avihu was an outstanding pilot and a brilliant officer. In some ways I happened to follow in his footsteps, first as second-in-command at the Fighting First, later as chief of IAF operations, and finally as commander of Tel Nof Air Base. Each time I found I was following a serious person, a charismatic commander, and a fighter pilot with a clear and well-reasoned approach to air combat. Son of a middle-class family, Avihu was unique in our group of mostly kibbutz boys. He had good manners and took pains with his personal grooming. His good looks added to his special glamour, under which hid uncompromising ambition. Avihu is an upright, slender man. His face is always well suntanned, and his eyes behind his pilot’s sunglasses are the color of steel. Even today, nearing seventy, he still has all his hair. He is one of the very few on whom everything looks perfect. Only rarely something peeps out of him and disappears quickly. On such occasions I recall my mother’s definition of what a perfect gentleman is.
During nine hard months of 1970, Avihu was squeezed by the same steamroller that had crushed Sam Khetz. The day Khetz was killed, Avihu had a brush with death, too, when he and his navigator, Saul Levy, crash-landed their badly damaged Phantom at Refidim. Avihu got out of the wreck of his aircraft, dusted off his flight suit, got into another aircraft, and rejoined his unit. He was an outstanding soldier and combat commander.
After the end of the War of Attrition he became “Mr. Phantom” and the representative of the wave of the future. At that time, the United States had replaced France as our source of military equipment. France had embargoed Israel in an ugly, nasty way. Then America stepped up and sold us Skyhawks, Phantoms, and then all the technology and equipment we were using. The American technology was much more advanced and very impressive. And more importantly, the United States was fighting at that time in Vietnam against the same Soviet training and equipment the Egyptians and Syrians were getting.
A whole reservoir of applicable knowledge opened for us in the United States. Most of us couldn’t get at that knowledge, or even read the language. Avihu could. He returned from America with the Phantoms loaded with knowledge and connections. Soon he taught the Hammers squadron’s men to read English, and they raided other English-speakers throughout the whole air force. The ever-growing Phantom community, with Avihu as its uncrowned prince, directed the military thinking of everyone from squadron level up to air force high command.
THE METHOD OF MISSILE ATTACK developed under Avihu was a complicated and sophisticated accomplishment indeed. Hundreds of aircraft were required to arrive—formation after formation—from the same direction and at very small intervals, and spray the enemy array as if from one hose. It had to be synchronized like a Swiss watch. And truly, the Defy and Model operations were glorious designs, activating hundreds of fast-flying fighters in complex maneuvers, interweaving like decorative Persian epigraphs. Each aircraft had to be accurate to a split second and not deviate from its course in the slightest.
These drills were very difficult and complex, and hazardous, too. I am proud of our wonderful air force, which succeeded in accomplishing these elegant maneuvers again and again in training and in war games, and which got out without casualties. Preparation for a SAM attack drill required bookkeeping any accountant would admire, and the actual performance was more courageous and spectacular than any aerial show by the Blue Angels over Oshkosh or anyplace else. Avihu demonstrated to us and to our commanders what a magnificent air force we were. It’s just a shame we were the only spectators—such performances would surely have brought us medals had they been done at the Paris Air Show.
Those drills created in us feelings of enormous satisfaction and great power, but I, and a few of my buddies, felt uneasy about all that. Our argument was that the operational worth of a fighter pilot lay in his being free to maneuver, not locked inside a cohort marching in lockstep to run the enemy over with the weight of their bodies. I saw the air force as wielding quality, not quantity power.
“Why are you putting us in a box?” I kept asking. “Can you imagine sending us to a dogfight in such close formation?”
“Of course not,” they would answer. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, in that case,” I would shout and pound the table, “fighting against SAMs is just another dogfight, against another kind of aircraft. Let us out of the box and let us fight. Enough of this parade ground bullshit!”
But once again, like that night with Sam Khetz, I found myself struggling against conventional wisdom. Everybody else thought the same way, and I lost the argument.
The real clients—the missile batteries—watched balefully from the balcony. They didn’t play our games.
THE OFFICERS IN THE OPS department looked at me strangely.
“SAM-6s? Where did you get your information?” If headquarters didn’t know much about the SAM-6, a squadron commander from Hatzerim who had just read routine intelligence reports definitely had to know less. “We’ll know where they are in good time,” they said, somewhat hesitatingly. “We’ll nail them before they move.” They didn’t get paid for chasing wild fantasies.
“Well,” I persisted, “suppose we don’t know. Isn’t it worthwhile just to check?” From today’s vantage point I know that I was sensing a kettle back then.
The operations officers said, “You are chasing your tail, Spector. The existing batteries were also thought to be mobile, and proved to be clumsy things that move slowly and with great difficulty. The problem is not finding the batteries. Our problem is how to enter the killing zone of the missiles and get out with minimum losses. And our current doctrine furnishes us with this.” Of course, they were talking about penetration at low level. But the question I just raised put the whole system in jeopardy once again.
Was it still right to fly at low level?
LOW-LEVEL PENETRATION is good only when approaching a target whose location is known in advance. But the problem with mobile batteries is, by definition, their unknown position. The pilot has to search and find them on his own. But lo and behold, there is no practical way to search for targets and locate them when flying at low level; the pilot’s field of view is too limited.
The idea that the positions of the missile batteries will not be known, and our pilots would have to fly around in the killing zone to look for them, was unbearable to everybody in the room. If this indeed was the situation, then all the work we had invested in planning, equipping, and training had been in vain. This was really an awful idea.
Even so, we had to check it out. We dialed air intelligence. The answer was prompt: “When the air force goes out to hit the SAMs, we will know the location of 90 percent of the batteries.” The faces of the operations planners lit up. Yossi from the training section breathed a sigh of relief and went out back to his desk. There was no need to run around and work to get more money and resources for new tests that were not already planned.
THE TEN BABOONS SAT before me. This was a company of captains, all excellent fighter pilots and navigators, and I looked into their eyes and saw my friends and myself six short years ago. I also was reading their thoughts. Like me six years earlier, they, too, hadn’t come willingly to the course. What were they going to get out
