The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and they are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience—working with them and observing them.
—ERIC SCHMIDT
ON OCTOBER 6, 1973, as the entire nation was shut down for the holiest day of the Jewish year, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War with a massive surprise attack. Within hours, Egyptian forces breached Israel’s defensive line along the Suez Canal. Egyptian infantry had already overrun the tank emplacements to which Israeli armored forces were supposed to race in case of attack, and hundreds of enemy tanks were moving forward behind this initial thrust.
It was just six years after Israel’s greatest military victory, the Six-Day War, an improbable campaign that captured the imagination of the entire world. Just before that war, in 1967, it looked like the nineteen-year-old Jewish state would be crushed by Arab armies poised to invade on every front. Then, in six days of battle, Israel simultaneously defeated the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces and expanded its borders by taking the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.
All this gave Israelis a sense of invincibility. Afterward, no one could imagine the Arab states risking another all-out attack. Even in the military, the sense was that if the Arabs dared attack, Israel would vanquish their armies as quickly as it had in 1967.
So on that October day in 1973, Israel was not prepared for war. The thin string of Israeli forts facing the Egyptians across the Suez Canal was no match for the overwhelming Egyptian invasion. Behind the destroyed front line, three Israeli tank brigades stood between the advancing Egyptian army and the Israeli heartland. Only one was stationed close to the front.
That brigade, which was supposed to defend a 120-mile front with just fifty-six tanks, was commanded by Colonel Amnon Reshef. As he raced with his men to engage the invading Egyptians, Reshef saw his tanks getting hit one after another. But there were no Egyptian enemy tanks or antitank guns in sight. What sort of device was obliterating his men?
At first he thought the tanks were being hit by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), the classic handheld antitank weapon used by infantry forces. Reshef and his men pulled back a bit, as they had been trained, so as to be out of the short range of the RPGs. But the tanks kept exploding. The Israelis realized they were being hit by something else—something seemingly invisible.
As the battle raged, a clue emerged. The tank operators who survived a missile hit reported to the others that they’d seen nothing, but those next to them mentioned having seen a red light moving toward the targeted tanks. Wires were found on the ground leading to stricken Israeli tanks. The commanders had discovered Egypt’s secret weapon: the Sagger.
Designed by Sergei Pavlovich Nepobedimyi, whose last name literally means “undefeatable” in Russian, the Sagger was created in 1960. The new weapon had initially been provided to Warsaw Pact countries, but it was first put to sustained use in combat by the Egyptian and Syrian armies during the Yom Kippur War. The IDF’s account of its own losses on both the southern and northern fronts was 400 tanks destroyed and 600 disabled but returned to battle after repairs. Of the Sinai division’s 290 tanks, 180 were knocked out the first day. The blow to the IDF’s aura of invincibility was substantial. About half of the losses came from RPGs, the other half from the Sagger.
The Sagger was a wire-guided missile that could be fired by a single soldier lying on the ground. Its range—the distance from which it could hit and destroy a tank—was 3,000 meters (or 1.86 miles), ten times that of an RPG. The Sagger was also far more powerful.1
Each shooter could work alone and did not even need a bush to hide behind—a shallow depression in the desert sand would do. A shooter had only to fire in the direction of a tank and use a joystick to guide the red light at the back of the missile. So long as the soldier could see the red light, the wire that remained connected to the missile would allow him to guide it accurately and at great distance into the target.2
Israeli intelligence knew about the Saggers before the war, and had even encountered them in Egyptian cross-border attacks during the War of Attrition, which began just after the 1967 war. But the top brass thought the Saggers were merely another antitank weapon, not qualitatively different from what they had successfully contended with in the 1967 war. Thus, in their view, doctrines to oppose them already existed, and nothing was developed to specifically address the Sagger threat.
Reshef and his men had to discover for themselves what type of weapon was hitting them and how to cope with it, all in the heat of battle.
Drawing on the men’s reports, Reshef’s remaining officers realized that the Saggers had some weaknesses: they flew relatively slowly, and they depended on the shooter’s retaining eye contact with the Israeli tank. So the Israelis devised a new doctrine: when any tank saw a red light, all would begin moving randomly while firing in the direction of the unseen shooter.
The dust kicked up by the moving tanks would obscure the shooter’s line of sight to the missile’s deadly red light, and the return fire might also prevent the shooter from keeping his eye on the light.
This brand-new doctrine proved successful, and after the war it was eventually adopted by NATO forces. It had not been honed over years of gaming exercises in war colleges or prescribed out of an operations manual; it had been improvised by soldiers at the front.
As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.
Yet what these soldiers were doing was strange. If they had been working in a multinational company or in any number of other armies, they might not have done such things, at least not on their own. As historian Michael Oren, who served in the IDF as a liaison to other militaries, put it, “The Israeli lieutenant probably has greater command decision latitude than his counterpart in any army in the world.”3
This latitude, evidenced in the corporate culture we examined in the previous chapter, is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the Israeli military. Normally, when one thinks of military culture, one thinks of strict hierarchies, unwavering obedience to superiors, and an acceptance of the fact that each soldier is but a small, uninformed cog in a big wheel. But the IDF doesn’t fit that description. And in Israel pretty much everyone serves in the military, where its culture is worked into Israel’s citizens over a compulsory two- to three-year service.
The IDF’s downward delegation of responsibility is both by necessity and by design. “All militaries claim to value improvisation: read what the Chinese, French, or British militaries say—they all talk about improvisation. But the words don’t tell you anything,” said Edward Luttwak, a military historian and strategist who wrote The Pentagon and the Art of War and co-wrote The Israeli Army. “You have to look at structure.”4