been prepared. Our orders had served only as guidelines for the field units in order for them to know what to prepare for.
“If we give the fighting units some responsibility for fighting methods,” I told my officers, “they’ll begin to think and prepare, and new ideas will surface.” Of course, I remembered the Baboons.
My men were furious.
“The field units have no general understanding,” some of them said. “Pilots deal with flying, and their knowledge of everything else goes in the slot under our office door.”
“Why not supply them with information?” I asked. “Most of it is not confidential.” But my planners opposed the idea. They were clever and able, and like most people of our kind they preferred to play their cards close to their chests. Also, my directives hurt their aesthetic sensibilities. I had relegated the “art of planning” to a simpler level, replacing colorful and sophisticated crochet with simple cotton checkered blankets.
“We are better off having mediocre fighting methods as long as the pilots understand and believe in them,” I told my planners. “Give the field commanders freedom to manage the details.”
My men didn’t like it.
I TURNED TO THE FIELD commanders. If the problem lay in the disconnection between the brain and the limbs, then the time had come to activate the neurons in those limbs. The method I used for it was “planning exercises.” The operations department mandated to the bases and the squadrons war games, in which we dictated to them a general situation and ordered them to use the tools at their disposal to achieve certain results. No indication was given to them of how to do the job. “Use what you have” was the rule. The units, sometimes competing against each other, had to call in all the expertise they could lay their hands on, open books and maps, and issue plans for their battle. Sometimes those war games included elements of actual execution—arming the aircraft, briefing, taxiing, and even attacking target ranges. This gave their planning a dimension of reality in timing.
At the end of the war games, there was a general debriefing in which the plans were evaluated, and the units’ solutions were compared against each other and against the “teacher’s solution,” which my department prepared clandestinely. There were hot arguments. The bases and the squadrons went deeper into the doctrines, initiated tests of their own, and the staff began to get fresh ideas and solutions to operational problems and had to compete against a smarter opposition.
But the deeper meaning was that the actual fighters—even though they executed the orders—took part in the thought processes and operational responsibility of the air force. There were even some exercises in which I paralyzed headquarters totally in the middle of a war game, and the bases had to continue the war by themselves, coordinating their actions.
In the first war games I met a phenomenon that surprised and repulsed me: some field commanders were not happy with any added work or responsibility. They preferred to receive detailed orders.
“Give us complete orders!” they demanded. “What else is headquarters for?”
I turned a deaf ear, and these voices weakened in time but never ceased entirely. There was another reaction: Benny Peled, who was at the end of his tenure as commander of the air force, was uneasy about this change.
“Are you taking the command away from me?” he kept asking.
David Ivry, who replaced Benny, understood the idea much better.
I STILL ASK MYSELF when the exact moment was that I decided to close my notebook and leave my desk job, since I had concluded that I was becoming a nuisance and should do something else. No doubt this happened when I felt my ideas conflicted with the air force’s ethos and got everyone’s back up.
As long as I wanted to add new, sophisticated weapons to the air force’s arsenal, all was well. But it was much less nice when I began thinking about the future of fighter aircraft. I also agreed that we still needed fighters and that they still were very efficient on some missions. But I could show the empty squares in my chart and argue that fighters were unable to fill them successfully, and thus fewer aircraft were needed.
I raised an idea called “a quality air force”: an air force one-third the size of our existing force but consisting of only super-modern aircraft, such as the F-15. At my request, research compared this model against the existing air force in several war scenarios. The researcher—Dr. Yitzhak Ben Israel, who later became a major general in the IDF—showed that within a framework of identical current costs, such a small and agile force could achieve better results in almost all scenarios. Only one assignment was left open: who would attack enemy ground forces and destroy thousands of tanks? Quality aircraft alone were too few for that. I had designated my imaginary remotely directed drones for that. I wanted us to develop and acquire such weapons using budget from “surplus” manned aircraft. I stepped on a lot of toes.
The prevailing wisdom pointed in the opposite direction, to adding fighter aircraft. Since the Yom Kippur War, the IDF’s command, headed by the chief of staff, Mota Gur, believed that the rehabilitation of the IDF and its preparation for war required massive force enlargement. The IDF and the Ministry of Defense got unprecedented finance and political power after that disastrous war, and used it. Our confidential defense budget—for Israelis, anyway—was discussed freely abroad. I found the numbers at UCLA and in the American press. I found that Israel was spending 30 percent of its national annual budget on defense—twice the expenditure of before the war, and five times other “normal” militarily active nations.
The IDF and the Ministry of Defense wanted to achieve military independence, and with excited assistance from the defense industry they pushed for development and production locally of combat ships, main battle tanks, fighter aircraft, and other projects needing a lot of infrastructure and full of economic risk. Even superpowers could barely afford these risks. Such ventures were hot topics and were protected by special interests. In this atmosphere, to talk about reducing the number of aircraft and developing drones was like swimming up Niagara Falls. The real issue was power—as fast and as much as possible. And power went to those who knew how to direct large streams of government finance into waiting hands. Getting and spending big money was vision, strategy, and leadership.
The need to buy many more fighter aircraft was supported by ground forces, too. They wanted to receive close air support in their war, and for this they needed lots of aircraft.
Professor Amnon Yogev, a colonel and respected physicist, came to me and said, “Spector, here’s the answer: if we give every fighting unit a laser-designating projector, the air force can give close support with accurate bombing.” Amnon was entrusted with laser-directed weapons. Technically, he was absolutely correct: a soldier could illuminate the target with his laser projector. The aircraft could drop a bomb that would home on the laser beam and hit the target. QED.
I told him, “Look, Amnon, you are promising every soldier that a fighter plane can support him in time of need. We don’t have that many aircraft.”
Amnon said, “One of the missions of the air force is to support the ground forces. Buy more aircraft.”
I reminded him that aircraft can’t work under threat of SAM batteries. If this is the way we take, we will have to achieve air superiority. I reminded him that this is exactly what we had promised before the Yom Kippur War, and exactly in this we failed.
“The air force,” I told him, “must concentrate its firepower on quality targets, not chase thousands of calls for support from companies and battalions.”
“Then what do we do, Spector?”
I didn’t have drones to solve his problem. I told him, “Buy a lot of machine guns and ammunition for your troops, because if they rely on air support they’ll end up facing the enemy with just a laser projector in their hands.”
IDF command was furious with me, and so was the air force.
OF COURSE, I KNEW AT THE TIME that my idea about changing fighter aircraft for drones was ahead of its time. Even I could understand this, and knew that the first smart bombs we developed had not been so smart. But I remembered the leap in quality that air-to-air missiles had made right before my eyes. And one more thing was clear to me: those weapons would improve and their cost of production decline only when we started to mass- produce them. This could be done only by placing orders to industry.
The first chit I signed my first day in office as chief of operations was an order for a thousand glide bombs. A
