Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

THE ISRAELI EXPERIENCE
when the Skyhawks arrived, simultaneously we saw over fifty groundto-air
missiles in the air at one time. Over fifty on a very, very narrow strip
of land!”’%
Against this wall of missiles, the IAF could do little to hinder the
Syrian advance, and during the night the enemy’s armored spearheads
began to gain momentum, with the few Israeli tanks unable to match the
night-fighting effectiveness of superior Syrian equipment.L07 By morning,
columns of Syrian armor were driving towards the escarpment that
overlooked the Jordan and, in the south, one column was within fifteen
kilometers of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee).
For “Benny” Peled, who planned to hit the Egyptian missile screen
that morning, the priority had suddenly shifted to the Golan Heights: “The
Defense Minister [Moshe Dayan] phoned me and said, ‘Benny, leave Sinai,
it’s of no importance right now, its only sand, it’s two hundred-odd kilometers
from Israel. We have a problem right on our doorstep, so just drop
everything.’ ”108 So instead of attacking the SAM batteries which were, in
effect, denying the Israelis their customary air superiority over the battlefield
in the south, the Air Force was again required to emphasize close
support on the Golan while the General Staff made desperate efforts to get
more men and materiel into the battle there. It was an expensive way to
work, but watching those masses of Syrian missiles had given “Motti” Hod
an idea.
The decision that I made, and employed there, was to try and draw out the maximum
amount of missiles from their batteries, to drain them dry before air power
could be implemented effectively. All the air force could have done-and didthrough
Sunday and Monday, to lunch time, was to drain dry the air defense system
of the Syrians. And they were not clever enough to understand what we did. They
kept on shooting and I kept on using tactics just to draw missile^.^^^
These tactics involved both fake and genuine attacks on the missile
sites as well as on Syrian ground forces. Attacks were only pressed home
under the most favorable circumstances, employing against the missile
sites “mainly weapons which would create a lot of shrapnel . . . area weapons.”
The Syrians had ECM to confuse the Israelis’ Shrike air-to-ground
antiradiation missile, but the Shrikes “could be used as a surprise in certain
cases.”llo Hanoch Bartov, the biographer of Israeli Chief of Staff David
Elazar, says that twenty-seven of the thirty-six Syrian missile batteries on
the Golan were “silenced” by nightfall on the 7th,”I but General Hod
remembers that “we did not silence them enough to give us freedom of
action over the front.. .in the first two days.’’Il2 In that time the Israelis had
lost at least forty aircraft, virtually as many as they had lost in the whole of
the Six Day War. Reputable scholars have argued that the figure was closer
to eighty,Il3 but that seems too high a total. As Armitage and Mason point
out, even forty “may be represented either as approximately 3 percent of
attack sorties flown, or 2 percent of all sorties flown or, rather more
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