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

THE ISRAELI EXPERIENCE
ities and field formations, spread over a large geographic area, could not be
adequately protected without applying a quite exorbitant proportion of
available men and material exclusively to that task; and 2) any ground
attack (offensive action being essential in winning a conventional war)
relying on such a screen for protection against enemy air power must, of
necessity, be unable to develop much momentum. After each tactical bound
to the forward limit of missile protection, the advance must stop until all
the elements of the missile screen can be reestablished on new ground.
To do that with the basic, long-range components of it, the SA-2s and
SA-~S, was a major task-one the Arabs never got around to-involving
considerable risk. Mutually supporting, so that if one was dismantled the
security of another was threatened, the SA-2 and SA-3 sites consisted of
buried concrete bunkers housing the appropriate radars (with only the
antennas exposed). Either four or six launchers were carefully sited and
dug-in in a precise symmetric relationship to the control center “because
their parallax computer is very poor.”i3o “Once installed, calibration was a
major problem . . . which took some time to solve.”
When a screen was firmly in place, with SA-~S, SA-7s, and ZSU-2314s
shifting about in the vicinity to complete it, there seemed little future in
subjecting the screen to air attack, unless 1) a degree of tactical or technological
surprise could be achieved that would permit a breach to be
made without incurring inordinate losses, and 2) there was also a clear
prospect of ground forces overrunning the area-or at least bringing it
under fire-before it could be reconstructed. One wonders if General
Peled’s “huge Cecil DeMille type of spectacle” would have worked on
October 7, even if it had been followed up by an immediate counterattack
across the canal as originally planned.’)’ It would seem unlikely that the
Egyptians could have been tempted into squandering all their missile
stocks, as the Syrians had.
The evidence suggests that the ground attack had to come first. When
the missile screen was finally breached, the deed was done by the Israeli
Army, not the Air Force. On the night of October 15-16, taking advantage
of the confusion brought about by the failure of the Egyptian attack on the
14th, a carefully orchestrated counterattack secured an Israeli bridgehead
on the west bank of the canal, near Deversoir, just north of the Great Bitter
Lake and precisely at the junction of the Egyptian Second and Third Armies.
Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon, commanding the first troops to cross, claimed
“he put four SAMs [batteries] out of action on the sixteenth, but seven or
even more may have been an accurate figure.”13z By noon on the 16th,
another authority recorded that “a battalion of 175mm guns had been ferried
across [the canal] and was already firing its long-range cannon at Egyptian
SAM Such heavy artillery would not normally be risked so far
forward, least of all in a shallow and still precarious bridgehead, raising the
distinct possibility that the Israeli Army had no confidence at all in the Air
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