Israeli leaders convened a series of hasty meetings. At 6:00 A.M. Elazar and Dayan met, the former wanting an instantaneous mobilization of four ugdot, the latter thinking it sufficient to mobilize two, one for each front, in order to secure the borders. Interestingly, Elazar wanted the two additional ugdot for a swift counterattack, not for defense. They agreed to defer the decision until a later meeting with the prime minister who, at 9:00 A.M., decided in Elazar’s favor. A rump cabinet meeting at 9:30 A.M. decided to communicate immediately with the American ambassador in order to avert war at the last moment. There was further deliberation about a preemptive air strike, discussion of which was postponed until a noontime meeting. The meeting was still in progress when word came that the attack had begun.
THE WAR
It is not our purpose here to trace in detail the events of the war.46 At approximately 2:00 P.M. the air forces of Egypt and Syria struck Israeli airfields in Sinai, plus some command posts and supply areas, but did not launch serious attacks against Israel proper. On both fronts a massive artillery bombardment—comparable in weight to those of the great offensives of World War II—supported assaults across the canal and into the Golan Heights. On the southern front the Egyptians managed to bridge the waterway on a broad front on the first two days, penetrating up to 10 kilometers inland (to the so-called Artillery Road) and digging in for the inevitable counterattack. This came on October 8 and 9, in the form of an attack by an Israeli reserve armored division led by Major General Avraham (“Bren”) Adan. The attacks failed, with heavy losses, and the Israelis reverted to a defensive posture, broken only by sporadic and limited counterattacks to relieve the besieged posts on the Bar Lev line, all but one of which were evacuated or surrendered within the first few days of the war. The Israelis smashed an Egyptian armored attack on October 14, launched across the front with the aim of reaching the line of the passes and, while so doing, relieving pressure on the Syrians. On the night of October 15–16, small Israeli forces crossed the canal in the vicinity of the Great Bitter Lake at Deversoir; despite fierce battles on the sixteenth through the eighteenth, the Israelis maintained their bridgehead on the west bank of the Canal, and prevented the Egyptians from cutting it off on the east. By October 22 they managed to encircle most of the Egyptian Third Army on the west bank of the canal, and following the breakdown of a UN cease-fire that night, completed the encirclement of the Third Army on October 24.
On the northern front the Syrians came very close to breaking through Israeli defenses in the southern sector on October 7. Indeed, for a short period of time—from approximately 5:30 A.M. to 10:30 A.M. on that day—only a handful of tanks and a stream of successful air attacks by the IAF stood between attacking Syrian forces and the pre-1967 border. By October 8, however, the situation had improved as the Israelis began to concentrate three ugdot (divisions) on the Golan Heights; by the tenth they had restored almost all of the pre-October 6 border, and by the eleventh had begun to penetrate further into Syria, approaching, during the next three days, to within 43 kilometers of Damascus. The advent of a large Iraqi expeditionary force made the weary Israelis pause but did not push them back. From the fourteenth to the end of the war the Israelis reverted to the defensive, beating off continuing, though weakening, Syrian counterattacks.
Given the disadvantages under which they had begun the war, the Israelis had recovered magnificently. Nonetheless, the war’s course and outcome exceeded their most pessimistic prewar calculations. The war lasted two or three times as long and cost far more in human terms than the Israelis had expected. In matériel as well as in lives the Israelis took heavy losses, for results that were less than expected. By October 7, for example, the regular armored ugda in Sinai under the command of Albert Mendler had lost fully two-thirds of its tanks—fewer than a hundred were left in commission.47 Similarly, in the first twenty-seven hours of the war the Israelis lost thirty aircraft, or 8 percent of their front-line strength; this compared with forty lost on the first day of the Six-Day War. In that war, as the commander of the IAF pointed out, they lost only six more on the remaining five days, but such was not the case in 1973.48 In the course of the Yom Kippur War the Israelis lost more than one hundred airplanes, or better than a quarter of their total force.49 Despite this, they did not succeed in smashing the Syrian air defense system. The IAF did far better against the Egyptians, who lost most of their SAM batteries, but only fairly late in the war. Whereas the IAF had expected, before the war, to eliminate Egyptian air defenses within two days, it was not until the very end of the war that the IAF could operate with impunity on the west bank of the canal.
Indeed, Israeli losses were so heavy, particularly in the first few days of the war, that it appears from several sources that they might have accepted a cease-fire on the tenth or even as late as the twelfth of October.50 To be sure, many of the losses were recovered. The Israelis are reported to have lost more than eight hundred tanks, or over 40 percent of their prewar total; yet by dint of wartime and postwar repair they recovered fully half of those, in addition to three hundred or more usable Egyptian and Syrian tanks captured during the war.51 The American airlift of supplies to Israel could not have made good these kinds of losses in so short a time.
The Arabs had suffered even more grievously, as Table 5–2 indicates. Yet at no point did the major Arab armed forces collapse, as they had in earlier conflicts. To the end the Syrians and Egyptians put up a dogged resistance, even after losing two-thirds of their armored force (in the case of the Syrians) or most of their front-line surface-to-air-missile (SAM) batteries (in the case of the Egyptians).
Moreover, Israeli military performance was, in some cases, unsatisfactory. The disjointed attacks of October 8 and 9 on the southern front, for example, temporarily reduced the strengths of Adan’s and Sharon’s divisions to between a half and a third of their normal size.52 In these attacks masses of tanks, largely unsupported by infantry or artillery, attempted to clear the canal by frontal assaults and suffered heavy losses to Egyptian infantry armed with antitank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, as well as to Egyptian tanks.53 After the war Israeli observers would criticize the IDF’s failure to fight at night (a traditional Israeli strength) and its largely frontal counters to enemy attacks. Some commentators—including reserve generals—argued after the war that Israel failed to make adequate strategic choices, for example, by massing ground forces for a counteroffensive in the north while contenting itself with defensive operations in the south.54 The brilliant adaptive capacities of Israeli commanders and the skill and raw courage of their men redeemed the initial defeats of the first few days leaving Israel master of most of the battlefields by October 24. All this notwithstanding, Israel emerged from the Yom Kippur War shaken and its Arab enemies if not triumphant, at least content.
Table 5–2. Arab Losses—1973 War
Egypt
Syria
Prewar
Losses
%
Prewar
Losses
%
Tanks
2,200
1,000
45
1,650
1,100
67
APCs
2,925
450
15
1,500
400
27
Artillery
2,220
300
14
1,200
250
21
Fighter planes
653
222
34
388
117
30
SAM batteries
146
44
30
34
3
9
SOURCE: Figures taken from Gazit, “Arab Forces,” pp. 188–90. Prewar numbers of tanks count only those tanks in units, not total numbers of tanks in inventory, which are higher. The Arabs did not recover anything like the quantit
y of captured or their own repairable equipment that the Israelis did. Moreover, aside from tanks and airplanes, Israeli losses in other kinds of equipment were relatively light—only 10 percent of APCs for example, negligible artillery, and no SAM batteries.
FAILURE TO ANTICIPATE—SOME PRELIMINARY VERDICTS
The Agranat Commission
In 1974 and 1975 a high-level Israeli commission, chaired by the chief justice of Israeli’s Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, and consisting of another justice, the comptroller general of the Israeli government, and two former chiefs of staff of the IDF published three portions of a long and detailed critique of the initial surprise and the conduct of the war to the Israeli government. Very brief excerpts of that report have been published; further portions will be released early in the twenty-first century, and others may never be released.55 The three partial reports had, however, an immediate impact in Israel and continue to influence students of the 1973 surprise. The Agranat Commission undertook the thankless task of assigning blame for the surprise and initial failures of the Yom Kippur War. It was cautious in passing judgment on political-strategic decisions during the war and the period leading up to it—a critical though perhaps an understandable flaw.56 Although it enquired into many aspects of the preparation for war and its actual conduct and made recommendations for changes in various areas, the Agranat Commission came to two sets of conclusions.
First and foremost, the commission, particularly in its first partial report (issued April 1974), took a hard look at the individual responsibility of particular individuals. The chief of staff; the head of AMAN; and his deputy for research, the head of the Egyptian desk at AMAN; the commander of the southern front (Shmuel Gonen); and his chief intelligence officer came in for severe criticism. In this section of their report (omitted in some of the English translations) the commission concluded that none of these officers should continue to serve in their current positions. In some cases—particularly those of David Elazar and Eliyahu Zeira—the commission came to its conclusion with evident regret. These two men had brilliant records as operational commanders: Elazar had conducted the one-day blitz on the Golan Heights in 1967; Zeira had served as a paratroop brigade commander and former head of the operations branch of the general staff. Both had done much good for the IDF, before as well as after the 1973 war had broken out: Elazar, in particular, had been a pillar of strength throughout its darkest moments.
There are a number of points of interest in the personal indictments. The commission criticized Elazar sharply for his unquestioning faith in AMAN before the war, for his handling of the armed forces in the week of muted warnings before Yom Kippur (including refraining from requesting a full mobilization on the morning of Friday, October 5), for his failure to plan for attacks without benefit of warning (which was not strictly true), and for failing to adopt the original Dovecote plan of distributing two armored brigades forward along the Suez Canal and one back. The commission criticized Zeira for his unflinching adherence to the erroneous intelligence “concept” that the Egyptians would not attack (about which more below), and for his insistence, until October 5, on saying that the probability of war was low. It argued in addition that he assured the IDF of several days’ advance warning of any attack, when he could not guarantee it, and that he failed to activate special intelligence sources that could have gained additional information.
The first partial report quoted Zeira’s testimony before the commission in a passage that reveals a personality less than comfortable with ambiguity:
The Chief of Staff has to make decisions, and his decisions must be clear. The best support that the head of AMAN can give the Chief of Staff is to give a clear and unambiguous estimate, provided that it is done in an objective fashion. To be sure, the clearer and sharper the estimate, the clearer and sharper the mistake—but this is a professional hazard for the head of AMAN. . . .
I served most of my time in the IDF not as a staff officer but as a commander. My nature does not lead me to pass responsibility to my superiors, if that is at all avoidable. . . . To take the course that you have suggested [that is, to have indicated at the beginning of October that the intelligence was ambiguous] would be in effect to say [to the Chief of Staff], “we have a complicated situation here: you make a decision.” So I was not inclined to do that kind of thing, and have done so very rarely. In general, I do not bring to my superiors matters that fall in my area of responsibility, saying, “even though these matters are my responsibility I am passing them on to you—you settle them.”57
Zeira’s self-confidence comes across equally clearly in an interview with American military journalists very shortly before the war: “The biggest problem Israeli intelligence faces? To underestimate what we’re up against,’ Zeira says. ‘But an equally big risk is that we would over-estimate.’”58 It is said that when Zeira became head of AMAN, an Israeli reserve general remarked: “Now we are heading for a catastrophe: there are three men at the top [Dayan, Elazar, and Zeira] who do not know what it means to be afraid.”59
Lower-level officers—with the exception of a lieutenant in the southern command, whose reports were suppressed by the southern command intelligence officer—received even harsher judgments from the Agranat Commission. Lieutenant Colonel Yonah Bandman, the head of the Egyptian desk at AMAN, received particularly sharp criticism for adding to an intelligence assessment of October 5, prepared at 1:15 P.M., the following paragraph:
Even though the evidence of deployments along the Canal would appear to indicate an intention to attack, according to our best estimates there has been no change in the Egyptian assessment of the balance of forces between themselves and the IDF. Therefore, the probability that the Egyptians intend to renew warfare is low. . . .
Bandman added this paragraph to the thirty-nine preceding it, which described the massive Egyptian deployments that indicated war. When asked why he did so, he gave this response:
I wrote the first version of the intelligence digest without paragraph 40 [quoted above], and I felt before I wrote it that I did not have to add it. . . . [after completing the first draft, however,] I thought that if I did not add paragraph 40 I would not have fulfilled my obligations. Because it was not enough that I simply presented the information: I was obligated to evaluate it as well. My assessment was that from a purely military point of view there were all the signs you could ask for of a design to attack; from the point of view of real intent there remained, in my view, the fact that they did not think of themselves as prepared for an offensive. They attacked twenty-four hours later, but that is a different matter.60
Bandman’s assessment, the commission believed, played a large role in the Israeli failure to mobilize until the morning of October 6.
What drove Bandman, as well as others in the Israeli military establishment, was what the Agranat Commission stigmatized as “the Concept.” The Concept had two parts: first, that Egypt would not attack Israel without the means (long-range bombers or surface-to-surface missiles) to strike at Israel proper, and particularly its airfields. This would enable the Egyptians to pin down the IAF and to deter the painful blows to Egypt’s heartland that had characterized the War of Attrition. Second, the Concept had it that Syria would only launch an all-out attack on Israel in cooperation and simultaneously with Egypt. (This second part held true.) AMAN did not, however, reassess the first and critical pan of the Concept in accordance with changing political considerations and deliveries of hardware (including SSMs and improved air defense weapons) to Egypt.61 Because of the Concept, AMAN, and the IDF more generally, worried more about the years 1975–76, when the Egyptians were expected to have purchased long-range, bombers and SSMs from the Soviets.62 Indeed, even midmorning of October 6, Major General Mordechai Hod, the former commander of the IAF who had just come to IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, expressed his disbelief that war would break out: “The Egyptians don’t have an air force!” he exclaimed.63
A second implicit theory was reflected in the A
granat Commission’s recommendation that more diversity be created in the Israeli intelligence community. In this view, AMAN’s virtual monopoly on intelligence assessments precluded the emergence of alternative explanations of Arab troop movements. The Agranat Commission urged the appointment of a special intelligence adviser to the prime minister, complete with a small staff; the strengthening of the foreign ministry’s research department; the creation of an office in the Mossad for evaluating the information it produced; and the improved dissemination of raw intelligence reports to the various assessment bodies and the prime minister and the minister of defense.
Two theories—individual responsibility and the lack of organizational diversity—appear to have explained, in the Agranat Commission’s view, the intelligence failure. Their verdicts, however, have received sharp criticism, and not only from those most directly affected. The “failure by organizational monopoly” explanation, for example, runs afoul of two facts. First, even the highly pluralistic American intelligence community did not predict the Egyptian and Syrian attack, despite its access to over-head reconnaissance from spy satellites, as well as other sources.64 Second, the Israeli intelligence community did have some limited elements of pluralism. The navy and the air force each had its analytical staff; and in fact the Israeli Navy mobilized fully on the strength of its internal analyses.65 Moreover, the separate commands had their own intelligence staffs. Unfortunately, the southern command intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Gedaliah failed to pass on assessments by his order-of-battle officer, Lieutenant Binyamin Siman-Tov, prepared on October 1 and 3, which argued that Egyptian deployments reflected not an exercise but preparation for an attack. Gedaliah, like his superiors, adhered to the Concept.66 There is evidence that others in AMAN were alarmed by Syrian and Egyptian moves in the two weeks before the crisis, and sought to intensify collection efforts as well as disseminate dissenting views. These efforts were rejected or blocked, however, by AMAN’s senior leadership, which dominated the analytical process.67
Military Misfortunes Page 15
