times, found the beginning of its solution from an unexpected direction: the soldiers themselves. One day Ido brought two men in green uniforms to my office. Both of them were big names. Dodik Rothenberg was the hero of the legendary Battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, a bloody battle during the Six-Day War. And Muki Betzer, tall and balding, was one of the most decorated soldiers from Commando Force, the top elite infantry unit. He had taken part in many operations beyond Israel’s borders, including the rescue at Entebbe. Both were heroes and thoughtful men.
Muki said, “Instead of fighting the army over their beloved assets, let’s establish a new reserve unit. It should consist of ex-commando reservists. Let’s train them specifically for air force missions.”
“Are there such things, released commando guys who can fight?” I saw in my mind’s eye flabby, grizzled veterans.
“There are. And they are okay.” Muki seemed to read my mind.
“Who will establish this new unit?”
“Me,” Muki said.
“And who’ll command it?”
“Me.”
Still, I had reservations about this kind of ex-commando fighter. I knew their mode of action. They prepared their operations years in advance, looking for absolute certainty. In fact, they were peacetime soldiers. I told Muki, “In aerial warfare there is no time and no certainty. I need guys who can get an order in the morning, prep till noon, mount helicopters in the evening, and fight at night.”
“They’ll do it.”
I made it certain he understood me: “I want to be able to scramble them to targets like fighter aircraft.”
“Can do.”
“And the same next day?”
“Same next day.”
I was impressed. Only one question remained: “How can I trust you to be at my disposal in time of need? At the first opportunity the greens will steal you for their trenches.” I wanted soldiers wearing blue berets, so it would be clear to whom they reported.
“Blue berets? Not yet,” said Muki. “Let’s go slowly. Let’s begin green, quietly. Later, the greens will get used to it, and finally they’ll give in. Let’s do everything gradually.” Clever Dodik nodded, but I, paranoid as I was, couldn’t rest until we succeeded in squeezing permission from Raful to establish the new unit—“not an air force unit, you hear me, Spector?”—in an air force base. If not under the air force command, at least they would be nearby, under our supervision.
And indeed the “battalion for air force missions”—a vague name was given to it intentionally—began to become a reality. Muki’s reserve soldiers were smart and agile, worked hard, and reported for long months of service. They developed tools and methods that inspired even me, and I was glad to see helicopter and fighter pilots mixing with those commandos routinely. These soldiers and officers were still wearing green berets—it took a long time before they changed to our blue ones—but the language they used began to sound like ours, and I could read their maps. I found myself dragged at night with Muki into all kinds of infantry maneuvers, inserted by helicopter in dark places, driving odd vehicles, and using unfamiliar weapons. On one of my visits in our battalion I saw a familiar back bent over his work. I slapped it, and Brutus the night fighter turned to me, a welding torch in hand. We hugged each other warmly. It came out that he, an engineer by profession, had volunteered to design and build some equipment for the air force’s new commando unit. If Brutus was there, then the whole thing was becoming a seriously scary weapon.
But while I began celebrating the birth of the helicopter commando, an unexpected weakness was revealed. Painfully, that weakness was in the helicopters themselves—the air force end of the deal. The flight profiles were too demanding, and the helicopters didn’t have sufficient instrumentation to ensure safe flight and landing on target. Their instrumentation was antiquated—on a level with the Harvard trainers I had flown in 1958. With such instruments, navigation and spatial orientation at night in enemy territory were difficult at best. The helicopters were capable of doing single, very special operations, like plucking with tweezers, but not the extensive deployments I needed from the commando unit.
In one of the exercises I took part in, a helicopter crashed due to loss of spatial orientation, and the dozens of soldiers aboard survived only by luck. This was really bad; Muki’s warriors knew how to attack the targets we selected for them, but we couldn’t guarantee getting them there in one piece and extracting them safely after the operation. This problem remained unsolved.
OF ALL THE ISSUES I wanted to address as chief of operations, the most important was a lesson I had learned in the Yom Kippur War: the integration of fighting units into the war as “heads,” not just as “hands.”
Air force headquarters, and my department of operations with it, saw themselves as the brains, which processed plans and doctrines and sent them down as detailed orders to the limbs—the squadrons and the air bases. This was exactly the system I was familiar with from my time as manager of one such limb. When I commanded the Orange Tails I became distrustful of this system, and my dissatisfaction grew later, when I headed the aerial training department. It wasn’t about the authority of headquarters to decide what should be done and who should do it. What bothered me was them dictating the method of execution in minute detail, as was the rule in their orders. In short, I was after central control of the what and the when, and for local control of the how.
I could cite many examples of blunders by a headquarters remote from the field that had produced plans such as Challenge—a bizarre doctrine that had sent Khetz and Avihu out to be sacrificed. Headquarters had rejected— without even checking—the idea of arming Mirages with Dagger missiles, and then it didn’t care to attend the debriefing when this force multiplier was successful. Headquarters was too lazy to reevaluate the attack methods against mobile SAM batteries. It didn’t think about the possibility of the Egyptians building bridges over the Suez Canal, nor did it have an answer to that problem. Immersed in its plans for various operazia, headquarters had made serious tactical errors, was not aware of actual weather and lighting conditions, of the performance of the bombs’ fuses. It rejected feedback from the battlefield. The reality the pilots had to deal with in the Yom Kippur War was different from anything the brains expected, but still, imprisoned in its old doctrines and its underground bunkers, headquarters continued to send down to the limbs orders full of errors that one could either fight against or just ignore.
The main problem was that neither the staff officers nor the field commanders were prepared for this. We hadn’t built any systems that would enable our limbs to function when the brain was confused or paralyzed.
And now, when I was part of the brain, I couldn’t avoid the possibility that the same problem could recrudesce.
“Uncertainty is basic to war,” I explained to my officers. “And even the newest doctrines and plans that we geniuses are developing now may fail.” This had no organizational solution. Even getting the best people to headquarters won’t help—who do we have more capable and knowable than Avihu, Sela, and the like? It was clear to me that I was no better than they, and in spite of all the improvements we had made, we could end up repeating the same mistakes if war came on our watch. I felt as if I were walking on eggs.
Against this background I changed my view about the orders we were issuing to the fighting units, and saw them just as “thought drills” and not plans to be executed word for word. Any dictation of tactical details was undesirable—it petrified pilots’ brains and impeded independent thinking.
The problem was that at the same time, peacetime operations—with which we were dealing, too—did require going down to minute details. In those peacetime operations there were sensitivities, involvement of commanders and civilians, and there was plenty of time for the planners to invent complicated methods that could be employed and controlled only in peacetime. Those intricate performances succeeded, and the complicated planning, with emphasis on detail, overflowed into the war orders and the operational culture of the force. I was afraid that the war plans my department kept sending down to the units were cooking up for the air force the same surprise that my predecessors had cooked for me.
FROM THE MOMENT I WAS NAMED chief of operations, I began working to restructure orders into tables of who does what and when. The how was a wholly different story, an issue of doctrine and not of plans and orders, and the source of the doctrine in my opinion was not in the operations department but in the air force at large. My department should be only the engine fueling the creation of doctrine. I returned to the way Operation Focus had
