independently, navigate to targets, and hit them. The common denominator for all those weapons was that they enabled hitting without being hit. The chief cost factor for aircraft and pilots was rate of loss, and aircraft and pilot costs were rising fast. Drones were cheap. They could perform missions too costly for manned aircraft and lowered the cost of decision-making and the economic impact of war. When I came to that conclusion, I found it had far- reaching, strategic results.
BEFORE I WENT FOR ADVANCED study, I had no interest in model planes of any kind. Only a very few men in the Israeli Air Force at that time had minds open enough to discuss such things. Lieutenant Colonel Dotan, for example, was doing experiments with radio-controlled model aircraft with cameras, to get intelligence from enemy areas. I admit I didn’t understand what made one of our best fighter pilots get involved in such a perverse and arcane subject. Drones, like computers, seemed to me as irrelevant for attacking missile arrays and other difficult ground targets as helicopters carrying little green men. In short, I remained a simple fighter pilot, a knight among knights. A pilot is a pilot is a pilot, with all the panache and limitations that come with this profession
IN 1976, WHEN I WAS SENT TO STUDY for a master’s degree at UCLA, in the United States, and especially after I began visiting the RAND Corporation, I got out of the fighter pilot box. Suddenly I saw new ways to look at war, not just as a medieval knight might have disdained the new technology of gunpowder.
I saw two clear technical developments relating to missiles and other unmanned aerial devices that changed my worldview: One, the accuracy of those devices was consistently getting better; and two, the cost of these systems was coming down. Then I recalled that the same process had taken place with our air-to-air missiles, and with the Soviet antiaircraft missiles that had killed us.
This was interesting. I gathered data, connected colored dots, and produced lines—of performance, of cost, of accuracy. I divided the X axis into years and found that the ratio of improvement in all aspects was accelerating. Suddenly a trend emerged: drones were capable of doing certain jobs very well, and were getting better. I understood that these devices were headed for some point in the future when they would be more cost-effective than manned aircraft in other jobs, too—for example, in attacking ground targets. And since they were so cheap— no human life was involved—their use was less conditioned: you could employ them even in tough situations with high loss rates; this was almost just an economic consideration.
I stretched my graphs into the future on a military setup I knew well. My calculations pointed to a nexus in the future in which a state using this kind of technology could inflict a fast, lethal, and above all unconditional blow on enemy forces. This was stunning. You could go for it all at once, with very few limiting military conditions.
The more I thought about manned aircraft and their missions and remembered Yak’s dictum, the more I thought it would be inefficient to fight antiaircraft systems with aircraft. And my new opinions went even further than that: I thought that antiaircraft systems, including missile batteries, were not targets in themselves. They were just nuisances, impediments on our way to our real targets: the enemy’s military assets. Elimination of the missiles, which employed most of our attention, was in principle a “parasitic” activity, a detour. I began to see things I had thought heroic before in a new, critical way. I began to think that we would be better off building weapons systems against the real targets. The new weapons opened a way to develop a first-strike capability to hit the enemy’s war machine directly without dealing with those antiaircraft and missile batteries. This required that we arm ourselves with systems other than fighter aircraft. The fighters were expensive, and since the Yom Kippur War seemed to me not efficient enough—even with aerial superiority—against the multitude of targets presented by the enemy’s military. The fighters were good to destroy specific, expensive targets, but you couldn’t get them to produce high-elimination capacity on the battlefield. And the enemy’s ack-ack and mini-SAMs, which could never be completely eliminated, kept promising a fall rate of more than 1 percent, which would keep manned fighters too far away from their targets. On the other hand, unmanned vehicles, which could suffer a much higher rate of loss due to their low cost, seemed to me a workable solution.
I began imagining thousands of small, cheap, unmanned missiles ignoring the enemy’s antiaircraft systems, passing through them and hitting his tanks and armored personnel carriers. I envisioned a first strike, not a nuclear bomb on cities in the style of Giulio Douhet or psychological devastation like Operation Focus in 1967, but a new strategic shock that would paralyze the enemy’s military power at the start of a war.
AND SO, WHEN I REPORTED to air force headquarters after a year of leave to take command of the operations department from Col. Avihu Ben Nun, I brought with me a notebook full of ideas, but my mind was mostly busy with that first-strike idea.
After a year in America I found that the Israeli Air Force of 1977 continued to invest its best resources and brightest brains in finding solutions for the problem of the SAM batteries. My department of operations was busy gathering alternative techniques and supporting systems for the elimination of the Egyptian and Syrian missile arrays. Even Benny Peled mocked their collecting of “thirteen backups for backups” to assure victory over those missiles, but still he signed the chit approving Avihu’s request to develop an additional backup—number fourteen. Every investment was considered legitimate to beat the missiles next time.
The main difference from 1973 was in the argument for attacking the SAMs. Before, the necessity to attack the missiles had grown out of the tactical need to achieve air superiority. But in 1977 the missiles were somehow promoted to a strategic target. Officers in my department claimed with deep conviction that the destruction of the missile arrays would have similar results to Operation Focus, the destruction of the airfields in the Six-Day War in 1967. They thought that the Arab regimes had invested so much in those missile arrays that a fast, elegant elimination of them would be such a defeat that the earth would quake under their feet. For my officers, the missiles were a be-all and end-all, both tactical and strategic assets, and the most worthy targets. It was put in logical terms, but in fact the determining factor was emotional. It was a matter of honor. The air force was conditioned to attack the missiles, and it couldn’t rest until it did just that. It had to avenge Sam Khetz’s death on the same battlefield.
PERSONALLY, I ALSO HATED the missile batteries as much as any of my friends and commanders, but I asked myself if they were really that important. And were we really capable of inflicting a massive aerial blow to enemy ground forces with our fighter force once we finished the SAMs? With an air force consisting of just fighter aircraft, I was far from sure of that.
FIVE YEARS LATER THIS DEBATE came to a head. On the evening of June 9, 1982, I was a brigadier general, commander of the air base at Tel Nof, and was summoned to Tel Aviv for debriefing of that day’s brilliant operation, the complete elimination of a Syrian array of missile batteries in Lebanon. We finished them off in half a day without a scratch on our planes. The hall was full, and everyone who was anyone was at that briefing.
Like all of us, I felt enormously happy and proud of this achievement. I was even proud personally to show pictures from my Skyhawk bombing sight: a SAM-6 mobile SAM battery, my archenemy since Operation Model in 1973, could be seen under my bombs. And so much did I rejoice in that victory that I ordered preparation of a special emblem of honor, and submitted it in the name of Tel Nof’s pilots to the officer in charge of the operation, Col. Aviem Sela. Since 1974 this man had designed and developed this mission, and his part in releasing the air force from the nightmare was great. When I was invited to the podium, I began by calling Aviem up and awarding him the prize. This was certainly an unusual action, almost pompous. The commander of the air force, David Ivry —who certainly deserved that prize no less than Aviem—gave me a look.
If there ever was a point in which strategic, not just tactical conclusions could be drawn from the elimination of SAMs, this was it. Feeling this way when my turn came to present Tel Nof’s part in the victory, I just skipped the common habit of counting the scalps my base had collected and instead proposed to use our proven capability and eliminate the missile batteries around Damascus.
“The elimination of twenty missile batteries may bring that army to collapse,” I said. “Syria is isolated and loaded with problems. It is like a fragile glass vase; one ping on the right spot can cause it to disintegrate, just as happened to Nasser in 1967.”
I began to suggest that once the bonfires burned around Damascus, the Syrian regime would realize how exposed it was, and this would be a good time to propose a settlement and even begin moving toward a political solution between our states, but I didn’t manage to say much of it. David Ivry stopped me, remarking sourly that this is not what I had been invited to the stage for. He said angrily, “Military officers should stay out of
