The most ambitious project of all, however, was to produce the Lavi fighter jet, using American-made engines. The program was jointly funded by Israel and the United States. The Lavi was designed not only to replace the Kfir but to become one of the top-line fighters in the world.
The Lavi went into full-scale development in 1982; on the last day of 1986, the first plane took its inaugural test flight. But in August 1987, after billions of dollars had been spent to build five planes, mounting pressure in both Israel and the United States led to the program’s cancellation, first by the U.S. Congress and then by a 12–11 vote in the Israeli cabinet.
Many years later, the project and its cancellation still remain controversiaclass="underline" some people believe that it was an impossibly ambitious boondoggle from the beginning, while others claim that it was a great opportunity missed. In a 1991 article in Flight International magazine, published during Operation Desert Storm, an editor wrote about his experience flying the Lavi back in 1989: “Now when the coalition forces fight in the Gulf they miss the aircraft they really need. It’s a real shame that I had to fly the world’s best fighter knowing it would never get into service.”8
Even though the program was canceled, the Lavi’s development had significant military reverberations. First, the Israelis had made an important psychological breakthrough: they had demonstrated to themselves, their allies, and their adversaries that they were not dependent on anyone else to provide one of the most basic elements for national survival—an advanced fighter aircraft program. Second, in 1988 Israel joined a club of only about a dozen nations that had launched satellites into space—an achievement that would have been unlikely without the technological know-how accumulated during the Lavi’s development. And third, although the Lavi was canceled, the billions invested in the program brought Israel to a new level in avionic systems and, in some ways, helped jump-start the high-tech boom to come. When the program shut down, its fifteen hundred engineers were suddenly out of jobs. Some of them left the country, but most did not, resulting in a large infusion of engineering talent from the military industries into the private sector. The tremendous technological talent that had been concentrated on one aircraft was suddenly unleashed into the economy.9
Yossi Gross, one of the Lavi’s engineers, was born in Israel. His mother, who’d survived Auschwitz, emigrated from Europe after the Holocaust. As a student in Israel, Gross trained in aeronautical engineering at the Technion and then worked at Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) for seven years.
Gross, a test-flight engineer at IAI, began in the design department. When he came up with a new idea for the landing gear, he was told by his supervisors to not bother them with innovations but to simply copy the American F-16. “I was working in a large company with twenty-three thousand employees, where you can’t be creative,” he recalled.10
Shortly before the Lavi’s cancellation, Gross decided to leave not only IAI but the whole aeronautics field. “In aerospace, you can’t be an entrepreneur,” he explained. “The government owns the industry, and the projects are huge. But I learned a lot of technical things there that helped me immensely later on.”
This former flight engineer went on to found seventeen start-ups and develop over three hundred patents. So, in a sense, Yossi Gross should thank France. Charles de Gaulle hardly intended to help jump-start the Israeli technology scene. Yet by convincing Israelis that they could not rely on foreign weapons systems, de Gaulle’s decision made a pivotal contribution to Israel’s economy. The major increase in military R&D that followed France’s boycott of Israel gave a generation of Israeli engineers remarkable experience. But it would not have catalyzed Israel’s start-up hothouse if it had not been combined with something else: a profound interdisciplinary approach and a willingness to try anything, no matter how destabilizing to societal norms.
CHAPTER 12
From Nose Cones to Geysers
If most air forces are designed like a Formula One race car, the Israeli Air Force is a beat-up jeep with a lot of tools in it. . . . Here, you’re going off-road from day one.
The race car is just not going to work in our environment.
—YUVAL DOTAN
DOUG WOOD IS A NEW AND UNLIKELY RECRUIT to Israel. With his calm and reflective demeanor, he stands out among his more brash Israeli colleagues. He was hired from Hollywood to do something that’s never before been tried in Jerusalem: Wood is the director of the first feature-length animated movie to be produced by Animation Lab, the start-up founded by Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit.
Wood worked as vice president of feature animation development and production at Turner, Warner Brothers, and Universal. When Margalit asked him to relocate to Jerusalem to create an animated feature, Wood said he would first have to see if Jerusalem had a real creative community. After spending some time in Jerusalem at Bezalel—Israel’s leading academy of art and design—he was convinced. “I met with the faculty there. I met with some TV writers and [author] Meir Shalev, and some other big storytellers,” he told us. “They were as good if not better than the people you would meet at the world’s top arts schools.”
But he also identified something different about Israel. “There’s a multitask mentality here. We’ve consulted with a lot of the Israeli technical people and they come up with innovative ways to improve our pipeline and do things more directly. And then there was this time I was working on a creative project with an art graduate from Bezalel. He looked the part—long hair, an earring, in shorts and flip-flops. Suddenly a technological problem erupted. I was ready to call the techies in to fix it. But the Bezalel student dropped his graphic work and began solving the problem like he was a trained engineer. I asked him where he learned to do this. It turns out he was also a fighter pilot in the air force. This art student? A fighter pilot? It’s like all these worlds come colliding here—or collaborating—depending how you look at it.”1
It’s not surprising that multitasking, like many other advantages Israeli technologists seem to have, is fostered by the IDF. Fighter pilot Yuval Dotan told us that there is a distinct bias against specialization in the Israeli military. “If most air forces are designed like a Formula One race car, the Israeli Air Force is a beat-up jeep with a lot of tools in it. On a closed track, the Formula One’s going to win,” Dotan said. But, he noted, in the IAF, “you’re going off-road from day one. . . . The race car is just not going to work in our environment.”2
The difference between the Formula One and the jeep strategies is not just about numbers; each produces divergent tactics and modes of thinking. This can be seen in the different “strike packages” that each air force constructs for its missions. For most Western air forces, a strike package is built from a series of waves of aircraft whose end goal is to deliver bombs on targets.
The United States typically uses four waves of specialized aircraft to accomplish a specific component of the mission: for example, a combat air patrol, designed to clear a corridor of enemy aircraft; a second wave that knocks out any enemy antiaircraft systems that are firing missiles; a third wave of electronic warfare aircraft, tankers for refueling, and radar aircraft to provide a complete battle picture; and, finally, the strikers themselves—planes with bombs. These are guarded by close air-support fighters “to make sure nothing happens,” Dotan explained.