Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Physically, Dotan dwarfed Karem. He was big, muscular, tanned, and known not only as an audacious fighter pilot but also, within the Air Force, as a congenial commander. Nicknamed Mr. Skyhawk, from the moniker of the U.S.-made Douglas A-4 fighter planes he flew, Dotan was celebrated for downing five Syrian MiGs—including two in a single May 12, 1970, air battle in which he killed one MiG-17 by the unorthodox means of firing an antitank version of the unguided Zuni rocket. He was also a fan of Karem’s, for Dotan appreciated his friend Abe’s brilliance as an engineer; indeed, that was why he had come to see him this Sabbath eve.

  Dotan dispensed with pleasantries.

  “Abe, why don’t you give me a Zuni rocket with a dihedral wing?” he demanded without even sitting down.

  “Ezra,” Karem softly scolded, motioning to a chair in front of his desk, “don’t tell me what I need to give you. Tell me how you’ll use it.”

  “I want to fire it from my aircraft so they’ll turn the radars on and shoot missiles at it,” Dotan said.

  He didn’t need to explain further why he wanted to add a wing that was dihedral, a common shape on airplanes, to a Zuni, a tubelike munition just five inches in diameter. Nor did he need to explain why he was in a hurry to get it. For the past twenty days, and for the third time since the creation of the Jewish state twenty-five years earlier, Israel had been at war with its neighbors Egypt and Syria, but with a frightening difference. Israel’s Air Force, which six years earlier had dominated the skies and been a key to victory in the so-called Six-Day War, had been rendered nearly impotent this time by surprising new enemy air defenses.

  The Egyptians and Syrians had invaded from two sides on October 6, choosing the most important holiday in Judaism, Yom Kippur, to launch their surprise attack. Egyptian tanks and troops flooded across the Suez Canal. Syrian forces joined by Iraqi and Jordanian troops pushed Israeli forces back to the edge of the Golan Heights, which Israel had captured from Syria in the Six-Day War. After initial setbacks, the ground troops of the Israel Defense Forces repelled the invaders, establishing a bridgehead on the Egyptian side of the Suez and holding the Golan Heights. Under pressure from their respective superpower allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel and its foes had signed cease-fire agreements two days before Dotan came to Karem. Whether or not those bargains held, though, the Israeli Air Force was going to need a way to counter those Arab air defenses in the future.

  In the four short weeks of what history would dub the Yom Kippur War, Israeli air losses had been devastating. Mobile batteries of Soviet-built SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs—supplied to Egypt and Syria by Moscow, operated with the help of Soviet advisers, and supplemented by thousands of advanced antiaircraft guns—had cost Israel not just one hundred warplanes but also its far more precious pilots. The SAMs had also inflicted untold Israeli casualties on the ground by making it difficult for the Air Force to provide Israeli ground troops effective close air support with attacks on enemy land forces. Using the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact’s tactics and equipment, the Arabs had erected a five-layered air defense umbrella consisting of long-range radars and missiles, short-range radars and missiles, and fighter aircraft. The long-range radars, positioned beyond Israel’s reach, would “paint” an Israeli fighter as it approached Arab forces and transmit the aircraft’s position to a short-range SAM battery lying in ambush. The short-range battery would then turn its radar on just long enough to target the Israeli plane and fire a SAM. Within seconds, a missile traveling nearly three times the speed of sound would be homing in on the Israeli aircraft from a short and deadly range. As its missile flew, the SAM battery would douse its radar and scurry away to avoid being targeted by Israeli planes armed with missiles that homed in on radiation.

  Dotan had just spent days flying risky observation missions over the battle lines in a desperate search for ideas on countering the enemy tactics, which was why he was in Karem’s office that evening. What Israel needed, Dotan told Karem, was a decoy to fool those SAM radars, and the radar image of a Zuni rocket with a dihedral wing ought to look enough like an airplane to do the trick. As an Israeli fighter jet neared the enemy air defense umbrella, its pilot could launch a winged Zuni. The enemy’s long-range radar would see the rocket as a manned aircraft and signal a short-range SAM battery to attack it. When the SAM battery turned its radar on to target the Zuni, Israeli planes with antiradar missiles would detect the SAM radar and fire at the enemy missile battery while the SAM battery pointlessly fired on the decoy.

  Karem silently pondered Dotan’s idea for a moment, the roar and whine of jets on the runways outside the only noise in the room. Then he waved his friend off.

  “You don’t need a rocket and you can’t afford the dihedral,” Karem said. “You do need a decoy, but it can’t be a Zuni.” Karem knew the Zuni’s radar signature was too small to mimic that of a fighter plane. “Invite me for lunch tomorrow,” he told Dotan. By then, Karem promised, he’d have a solution.

  After Dotan left, Karem called his wife, Dina, to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner that evening after all, news she was used to after seven years of marriage. Karem stayed at the office through the night, feverishly working the engineering challenge Dotan had given him. The next day, promptly at noon, he was on the doorstep of Dotan’s home in a suburb north of Tel Aviv. Under his arm was a set of drawings produced during his all-nighter: a design for a winged decoy about the size of a small target drone, but with special radar-reflecting spheres on its sides to make it look big to SAM radars. Light enough to hang under a manned jet’s wing, Karem’s decoy would be unpowered but aerodynamically shaped so that when released at thirty thousand feet it would glide at a plausible fighter plane speed of Mach 0.85—about 575 miles an hour at that altitude—into the enemy air-defense umbrella.

  The next morning, Dotan took Karem’s glide decoy idea to the commander in chief of the Israeli Air Force, Major General Benjamin “Benny” Peled. By midday, IAI had Air Force approval to build some prototypes as a quick-reaction project. The ranks of IAI’s engineers had been thinned by the war, as many were reservists called up by the military, but Karem assembled a small team from those available and started work immediately, pushing his group to keep at it nearly around the clock.

  A week into the project, someone came back from a trip abroad with a copy of a magazine article describing a new U.S. Air Force radar decoy with folding wings that had just been flight-tested successfully. Karem urged the Israeli Air Force to consider trying to get the U.S. decoy instead of having IAI produce his, but he was instructed to carry on with his work. Four weeks later, his decoy made its first test flight. Over three more weeks, seven further tests were flown. Not all were successful, but the prototypes flew well enough that Karem’s preliminary design work was largely done, which allowed him to turn his attention to other things.

  Soon after his work on the decoy, Karem decided to take a major gamble with his career. For most of his decade and a half as an aeronautical engineer, he had focused on the problems and possibilities of manned fighter planes and transports. But for the last couple of months, he had spent twenty hours a day thinking about what amounted to an aircraft with no pilot inside. There was nothing new about pilotless planes; inventors had designed them in a cornucopia of configurations since the First World War. By the 1970s, Jane’s, the authoritative military publishing company, listed 120 separate types of pilotless planes in a Robot Aircraft Today pocket guide to what experts of the day usually called remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs. Yet except for radio-controlled target drones, few unmanned aircraft had been adopted by the world’s militaries, in large part due to poor reliability. As Karem knew, aircraft without pilots on board tended to crash a lot more than those with pilots inside them. But this decoy project had taken him down a novel mental path, and before long that path would lead him on a journey of discovery, a pioneering exploration of an aviation frontier.

  * * *

  Only two months
after finishing work on the decoy for the Israeli Air Force, Karem stunned his bosses and most of his coworkers at IAI by quitting his job as director of preliminary design. He left to start his own company, a move he had been mulling over since before the Yom Kippur War. After only three years at IAI, Karem had become deeply disillusioned with the way things were done at the massive aerospace company. All IAI’s stock was held by the Israeli government, and in Karem’s view government officials and many IAI executives treated the company more like a jobs program than a corporation. They hired far more people than necessary; the way Karem saw it, IAI’s employees did less work in more time at higher cost to the taxpayers than was warranted. He believed in his bones that in most fields, especially aeronautics, the best work and the best ideas were produced not by large organizations—especially those influenced by politics—but by small teams of talented people working hand in hand toward common goals.

  Karem’s belief in teams stemmed from his youth, when Israel was still a vibrant work in progress, a magnet for Jewish idealists, and a dynamic dream coming true for Jews the world over. He fondly remembered how, in those days, younger members of the fresh and still fragile Jewish state teemed with plans and hopes for building a new society, a fundamentally good civilization, and a sanctuary for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution and a Holocaust whose extent was still being revealed. His high school home room teacher for four years, a tail gunner in a British bomber during World War II, preached that the Jews would survive and secure their freedom only if they lived one for all and all for one. The young counselor who advised Abe’s chapter of the Aero Club stressed the importance of members helping one another with their designs. At IAI, Karem had been a rapidly rising star, but after proving several times that he could do major work faster and better with fewer people and save the taxpayers money at the same time, he found his efficiency rewarded mainly by resistance. One executive even reproached and threatened him for telling the Air Force that the modification of a particular fighter plane could be done in one year instead of the three IAI had estimated, saving two million out of the three million man-hours of labor the company was planning to commit to the project.

  By January 1974, Karem was fed up, and after running the idea past friends in the Air Force he announced that he was leaving IAI in May to start his own company. After he invited a handful of his favorite engineers to come along, an IAI vice president called Karem into his office.

  “Abe, we all love you,” the man said. “We owe you a lot. But we had a meeting about you forming your own company, and we decided we are going to crush you. So don’t do it.”

  “Why?” Karem asked. “You are seventeen thousand people, and I’m going to be what, five hundred?” At the time, Karem hoped to build a company that would be about that size.

  Size didn’t matter, the vice president said, but “every time we’re going to propose something, they will say, ‘But Abe will do it faster and cheaper,’ and we’re not going to have that.”

  As Karem later learned, the warning was friendly, but the threat wasn’t idle.

  * * *

  The clash between Karem’s brash ways and the realities of IAI kindled his decision to leave the company, but something else was at work as well. The task of designing that radar-tricking glide decoy had led Karem to look at things in a new light. When he did, he had an epiphany.

  The decoy he designed for IAI was primitive; in fact, it would have been less capable than the remote-control target drones used since the 1930s to train fighter pilots and antiaircraft units. But while thinking about the problem the decoy was meant to solve, Karem realized that an unmanned aircraft with the right capabilities could do far more than merely trick SAM batteries into revealing their locations. A remotely controlled drone armed with antitank missiles and designed to loiter in the sky for hours at a time could be one way to defeat—or, better yet, deter—another invasion of Israel.

  Geography had forced Egypt’s tanks to mass as they funneled through holes blasted in defensive embankments to cross the Suez Canal and enter the Sinai Peninsula. “Looking at that,” Karem recalled years later, “I said, if we are right on top of this high concentration of forces, you can throw some missiles at them. They will say, ‘This is not a good day,’ and back off, and we are not killing that many people. You let them spread, they throw their armor against your armor, their air force against your air force, and all of a sudden you have thousands and tens of thousands of casualties.”

  Pilots add weight to an aircraft, and more weight requires carrying more fuel; besides, pilots need to land every few hours to rest. But a fleet of pilotless aircraft such as Karem was imagining would have the persistence—the flight endurance—to provide an air-to-ground defensive missile system guarding Israel’s borders day and night. Moreover, if the enemy shot one down, no pilot would be lost. Achieving the necessary flight endurance would be one of the hardest parts of his challenge, but Karem was sure he could design such a drone. For one thing, he believed himself not only the best engineer in aeronautics but probably the best engineer of any kind in all of Israel. Beyond that, he had been a model aircraft hobbyist since his teens, and as a modeler his specialty was a type of aircraft whose sole objective was endurance.

  Thrown or towed into the air like a kite on a fifty-meter-long string and then released, free-flight gliders are the oldest form of model aircraft and among the trickiest to build. A schoolchild’s paper airplane technically fits the definition, but in competitions the models are far larger—wingspans of six feet are common—and more sophisticated. Model gliders are built of lightweight material, such as balsa and tissue, and usually weigh a pound or less. The goal is to make a plane that is capable of staying airborne long after its launch or its release from the tow line, but without any remote or automated controls to help keep it aloft.

  Like the materials used to build it, a tow-line glider’s flight characteristics are the opposite of a jet fighter’s. A model glider typically floats through the air at two or three miles an hour or less, gently circling until aerodynamic drag and the law of gravity return the aircraft to earth. In international competitions, the winning aircraft is the one that accumulates the most flight time over a series of launches within a strict limit of three to three and a half minutes per flight. The time limit and multiple rounds prevent winning or losing by the luck of the wind, though catching a thermal of the sort birds often ride is a favorite technique for success.

  A good free-flight glider is rugged enough to withstand turbulence and return to stable flight or take a hard landing, yet light and aerodynamic enough to fly as close to three minutes as possible even in calm air. Most carry a dethermalizer, a device operated by a timer or activated by radio signal, which moves a control surface to put the plane into a “deep stall”—a sudden dive—and bring it to a gentle landing. Deep stall is used after a round’s maximum flight time has been achieved, or to escape a thermal that threatens to carry the model away.

  The best free-flight modelers employ all sorts of tricks and techniques to improve endurance, and Karem was a world-class free-flight modeler. Free-flight gliders were what Abe had learned to build in the Aero Club, and he pursued the hobby into adulthood. In August 1963, as a twenty-six-year-old Air Force officer, he placed tenth in his category representing Israel at the free-flight World Championships in Wiener Neustadt, Austria.

  Two years later, Abe met Dina Schleiffer, a petite, lively, smart conscript who showed up one day in the Air Force engineering spaces, assigned to fulfill her obligatory two years of military service drafting technical drawings for engineers. Only eighteen, she was ten years younger than Abe, but he found her much more mature and confident than older girls he knew. They started dating, and soon Dina was traveling with Abe to free-flight competitions. She loved the little planes he designed, especially one he put together just as a spare and called his “ugly duckling.” She loved helping him launch his gliders when he competed. Most of all, Dina loved Abe,
and in 1966 they married. For the rest of their lives, she would sometimes accuse him of tilting at windmills, but she always helped him in his work and backed him when he took major risks.

  A month or two after leaving IAI, Karem set up a company of his own called Matos (Hebrew for “aircraft”) and began work on his idea for an armed drone to patrol Israel’s borders. Friends in the Air Force counseled him to be less ambitious in his design; he should just make a reconnaissance drone with a TV camera that would send imagery to forward air controllers (officers on the ground who direct air strikes) rather than arm the RPV itself. The Air Force commander, Benny Peled, himself an aeronautical engineer, was even less encouraging. Peled told Karem that he wouldn’t buy such a drone for the Air Force because its mission was fundamentally an Army job. Appalled, Karem pointed out that if he created a pilotless aircraft for the Army, it would have to be a helicopter, so that it could operate from wherever the Army was stationed. But a helicopter flies on a column of thrust created by rotors whose blades turn hundreds of revolutions per minute to keep the craft airborne, a fuel-thirsty and violent way to fly compared to airplanes. As Karem reminded Peled, helicopters shake like hell and have lousy endurance. Karem was also aware that others had taken on this challenge with unsatisfying results. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Navy built and deployed an unmanned helicopter to carry antisubmarine torpedoes; in the 1960s, the Navy added a TV camera and various weapons, and used the aircraft in Vietnam for reconnaissance and attacking enemy convoys moving at night. But in 1971 the Navy cancelled the program after half of the 810 unmanned helicopters that had been built crashed. Most of those that remained were used as target drones.