Archie to SAM: A Short Operational History of Ground-Based Air ...

OPERATIONS BETWEEN VIETNAM AND THE PERSIAN GULF
The IAF clearly won the air war, destroying about 450 Arab
aircraft, while losing about 107 aircraft in combat, 115 overall.
Compared to the 1967 war, the Arabs lost about the same
number of aircraft—although many more in the air—while the
Israelis lost twice as many. On a sortie basis, however, IAF losses
actually declined from 4 percent in 1967 to just over 1 percent
in 1973. Arab losses in 1973 were just under 5 percent. 19
Although the IAF defeated the Arab air forces in the air, it
failed to use air power as it had in the 1967 war. CAS proved
limited and disappointing, especially in the first three critical
days of the war. One study concluded that aircraft did not unequivocally
damage or destroy one tank. Even if this decline in
CAS effectiveness is overdrawn, air power clearly influenced
the war less in 1973 than it had in 1967. A dense, mobile, mixed,
surface-based air defense system thwarted arguably the besttrained
and highest motivated air force in the world and inflicted
severe losses on it. Just as American Airmen underestimated
North Vietnamese air defenses, so had the Israeli
airmen underestimated Arab air defenses. Both paid the price.
The 1973 war seemed to indicate that the balance between the
offense and defense (specifically aircraft versus ground defenses)
had swung in favor of the latter. Aircraft appeared to have lost
its battlefield dominance. 20 The IAF action in Lebanon in the
summer of 1982 altered this view.
Combat since 1973: Bekaa Valley
Lebanon existed in a state of chaos from the occupation by
militias of right and left, Palestinian guerrillas, the Syrian army,
and from fighting among these groups and between them and
the Israelis. The Syrians rebuilt their military forces from the
defeat of the 1973 war and, in so doing, almost tripled their
ground-based air defenses, increasing them from 30 to 80 batteries
and manning them with their best personnel. In late
April 1981, the Syrians moved 19 missile batteries, including
SA-6s, into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Here, the Syrians established
a dense and, what appeared from the record of the 1973
war, to be a formidable air defense system. 21
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