A SAMless Sinai, 1973

MacCaulay

Banned
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, one of the centerpieces of the Egyptian and Syrian strategies was the introduction of extensive Surface-to-Air Missile systems over the areas they had selected as battlefields in the Sinai and Golan Heights.
This was a planned move and stroke of genius to nullify the Israeli Air Force, and it worked. The Egyptian army, especially, operating underneath a SAM shield (except for a foray to the Mitla and Gidi Passes) was able to acquit itself fairly well because of it's immense multitude of Sagger missiles and other defensive weaponry.

The shear amount of killing power and the range the masses of Egyptian soldiers could deploy it at was stunning to the Israelis, especially since their Air Force couldn't seem to do anything about it.
The IAF had two plans for this war: Operation Tagar (the attack on static Egyptian SAM sites) and Dougman 5 (a similar Syrian operation). It was decided within 48 hours to launch Operation Tagar once information started flowing in about the divisional units of the Egyptian Army that were already across the canal and into Sinai.

The IAF carried out the first phase of Tagar; a toss-bombing of several radar sites in preparation for a final attack on the SAM launchers themselves. It was thought that they would be able to complete the destruction within a few days. But when the F-4s and A-4s returned to their bases, the ground crews were told not to fit them with the loadouts for the second phase of Operation Tagar, but for Dougman 5.
The entire IAF, even though it couldn't fit in the airspace over the Golan Heights, was directed to go after Syrian targets.

The helicopters that had launched drones over Sinai didn't have time to move north, and neither did the photo-recon planes. So when Dougman 5 was launched, it was done so without any intelligence whatsoever. This was a gamble the IAF would regret. According to The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinowitz, only one Syrian SAM battery was destroyed, while six Israeli Phantoms were lost (all to ground fire).

This is where The Yom Kippur War posits what could have been:

Of all the what-ifs of the war, the decision to call off Tagar is probably the most weighty. If the operation had been succesfully executed, stripping the Egyptian army of its missile shield, it would clearly have been a different war. Without the missiles to wory about, the IAF could easily have eliminated the conventional antiaircraft batteries from altitude. The planes would then have been free to hover over the canal and hit the bridges and ferries, and they would have been able to methodically attack the ground forces that had already crossed.
Not all air force officers were certain about how Tagar would have played out given the mobility of the SAM-6s and uncertainty about suppressing conventional antiaircraft fire by toss bombing. But Bin-Nun, Furman, Amir, and other senior air force officers would remain convinced that Tagar's cancellation denied Israel an early and decisive victory. There was no question that the Egyptian missiles would have been eliminated Amos Amir would say years later. The only question was how many planes would have been lost. This, he expected would have been in the dozens.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Seems to assume that the Egyptians don't have an airforce. If the SAM shield hurts the IAF and even the most optimistic assessment reads dozens of planes, thats something like 20% of Israels airforce, on the very first day of the war. Once thats done, the IAF has to deal with the Egyptian airforce and the ground targets. The EAF only has to prevent the IAF from interefering on the ground, a fairly simple task.

And an IAF which has suffered heavily with respect to its ground attack capability.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Seems to assume that the Egyptians don't have an airforce. If the SAM shield hurts the IAF and even the most optimistic assessment reads dozens of planes, thats something like 20% of Israels airforce, on the very first day of the war. Once thats done, the IAF has to deal with the Egyptian airforce and the ground targets. The EAF only has to prevent the IAF from interefering on the ground, a fairly simple task.

And an IAF which has suffered heavily with respect to its ground attack capability.

Well, I don't think there's ever been a question as to the superiority of the IAF against the surrounding Arab air forces. That was the main reason they went with SAMs: they don't have to dogfight the Israelis.
 
Mac: the US didn't supply Wild Weasel equipment or ECM for the Rhinos? :confused:

They did have ECM and had been using it against the Egyptians for a few years, but it's not a magic bullet. The Wild Weasel doctrine and equipment were only a few years old at the time, so it's not surprising that the Israelis didn't use it and the US didn't give it to them.
 
Mac: the US didn't supply Wild Weasel equipment or ECM for the Rhinos? :confused:

My dad, who was in the IDF for the '73 War, told me about how they frighteningly didn't have any air support for a few days, and then when it came back, it looked like a fireworks show, which suggests to me that some kind of countermeasure is getting used, after a hasty refit.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Mac: the US didn't supply Wild Weasel equipment or ECM for the Rhinos? :confused:

They did have ECM and had been using it against the Egyptians for a few years, but it's not a magic bullet. The Wild Weasel doctrine and equipment were only a few years old at the time, so it's not surprising that the Israelis didn't use it and the US didn't give it to them.

Truth is mostly correct. Also, until I read this book I didn't realize the sheer mass of SAMs the Egyptians and Syrians were deploying. You mention ECM, and this book also talks about how the Americans had provided the Israelis with ECM pods for the F-4s that could jam the SAM-2s, but they were unsure about the SAM-3 threat as they hadn't had sufficient information about it over North Vietnam. Then there were the SAM-6s (I think?) which were more mobile.

This was the first truelly layered SAM net, with SAM-3s for low level and SAM-2s for higher stuff (if I remember right) and the IAF for better or worse blundered into it twice before it finally took it down later in the war. Had they gone through with Tagar and had it worked, heck, had it even taken out the SAM-2s and SAM-3s, then they would've been in the kind of shape to cut the bridges and ferries over the Canal and strand several Egyptian Army divisions with their backs to the water in the Sinai and no air cover.
 

The Sandman

Banned
I think part of the issue is the situation in the Golan. A Syrian advance there is far more immediately catastrophic than an Egyptian one in the south, and therefore it's going to be hard for the Israelis to justify leaving the northern front without any visible air support while they suppress the Egyptian SAM net.

What about the Israelis doing it the other way around? Launch the full Dougman 5 (including the helicopters and the recon planes) first, then turn the whole thing around for Tagar? Especially since the more of the Egyptian forces they get across the Canal, the worse of a situation they'll be in once Tagar goes through and the IAF can safely start hitting the Egyptian supply routes.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I think part of the issue is the situation in the Golan. A Syrian advance there is far more immediately catastrophic than an Egyptian one in the south, and therefore it's going to be hard for the Israelis to justify leaving the northern front without any visible air support while they suppress the Egyptian SAM net.

That's an argument that's made in the book by a few IAF army commanders. There was an A-4 unit kept on the ground and out of the Sinai operation in order to lend any support that could be brought to bear on the Golan if it was possible.
What alot of the IAF commanders thought was insane was that the amount of aircraft being told to do rearm prepare was illogical. There's only so much airspace over the Golan and they couldn't all fit, but that was a big problem with the Israeli command at that early stage in the war: they were reacting and not forcing the Arabs to react to them.

What about the Israelis doing it the other way around? Launch the full Dougman 5 (including the helicopters and the recon planes) first, then turn the whole thing around for Tagar? Especially since the more of the Egyptian forces they get across the Canal, the worse of a situation they'll be in once Tagar goes through and the IAF can safely start hitting the Egyptian supply routes.

That's a very interesting idea. Get the decisiveness that was missing from the planning that day and then run it in a different order...
 
According to the Genocide, the SA-2's minimum effective altitude was Angels 10. SA-3 was anything above 300 feet, and SA-6 was effective at any altitude. So you'd need Cobra gunships and Wild Weasel Rhinos to take out the SA-6 systems, and conventional ECM/chaff/flares for SA-2/3.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
According to the Genocide, the SA-2's minimum effective altitude was Angels 10. SA-3 was anything above 300 feet, and SA-6 was effective at any altitude. So you'd need Cobra gunships and Wild Weasel Rhinos to take out the SA-6 systems, and conventional ECM/chaff/flares for SA-2/3.

Well, the Israelis had a plan to take them out, they just didn't get a chance to enact it in the first 72 hours of the war.

A large reason they did the toss-bombing, also, was that they only had a finite amount of aircraft. Suppose they take out the entire Egyptian SAM system. They paste it. And they lose a third of their air force and 9/10 of their Phantoms. Then they might as well not have done it since they've pretty much lost the their best weapon, you know?

By toss-bombing they were keeping their danger to a minimum until they totally had to go into the fire.
 
You have to rember the first couple of hrs the Israelis were running around like a chicken with its head chopped off . And it looked like for a lot of the first day that the army had been killed on the Golan hights .
We watched the IDF Air uints come in at 40 feet or 14 metters trying to make a bombing run so they were not hit by SAM's ( yes you could almost reach up and touch the bombs on the aircraft as they went over ). Rember up to that time the IDF did not need the Jamming pods or other electronic warfare equpment that the US was useing in Vietnam .
 
As I understand it the problem was not one SAM or another but the combination. Apparently to avoid the SA2 & 3 puts a plane right in the particluar trajectory of the SA6 which gathers speed in a low climb then zooms up. The way to avoid the SA 6 is to stay low enough to put you into the envelope of the ZSU23, so whatever you do there is something suited to shooting at it.

When the mobile SA6 and ZSU23 moved out of the fixed SA2 & 3 umbrella they didn't have to avoid those missiles and could concentrate on avoiding the SA6 zoom-climb without going low into the mobile guns.
 
According to the Genocide, the SA-2's minimum effective altitude was Angels 10. SA-3 was anything above 300 feet, and SA-6 was effective at any altitude. So you'd need Cobra gunships and Wild Weasel Rhinos to take out the SA-6 systems, and conventional ECM/chaff/flares for SA-2/3.
But the SA-2 was a real pain in the butt in North Vietnam, where it routinely killed stuff well below Angels 10. Why's that? A flaw within the US air forces? Or did the North Vietnamese just get lucky?
 
But the SA-2 was a real pain in the butt in North Vietnam, where it routinely killed stuff well below Angels 10. Why's that? A flaw within the US air forces? Or did the North Vietnamese just get lucky?

SA-2, especially in later versions, was capable of kills down to about a thousand feet above the ground, and the latest ones with optical tracking could make kills at three hundred or less if memory serves. It was definitely more effective at higher altitudes though due to speed and acceleration issues.
 
I think the Sandman's idea is quite possibly better than simply continuing Operation Tagar. The Syrians in the north are in a far more dangerous position vis a vis the Israelis than the Egyptians are. In the eyes of the Israeli high command, therefore, this is the force that needs to be stopped immediately. On the other hand, the Syrians are, overall, far less effective than the Egyptians. Strip away the SAM network, and they are mincemeat. meanwhile, an impending catastrophe in the north means that, as IOTL, the egyptians must advance past their own SAM coverage to support them, thus opening themselves to the IAF.

What I question is whether this is worthwhile. I don't know the specifics of the plan, but any attack on these layered AA defenses is going to cause serious loses. Now, a huge part of Israeli doctrine was built around the capabilities of their powerful and flexible, but finite air force. The sort of loses that this operation entails may not be worth the effort.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I think the Sandman's idea is quite possibly better than simply continuing Operation Tagar. The Syrians in the north are in a far more dangerous position vis a vis the Israelis than the Egyptians are. In the eyes of the Israeli high command, therefore, this is the force that needs to be stopped immediately.

This brings to mind something else that I've read about the Syrian plan during 1973. In multiple books, it notes that they pretty much stopped at the Golan, even after they'd busted the southern front wide open and the Jordan river valley lay before them. The Israelis (and military logic) expected them to flood into Israel proper. But for some reason about 8 to 10 hours after the attack had commenced (4am or so) Syrian armoured units simply stopped in many places and didn't advance farther.

Now, there's Egyptian and Israeli accounts of the war, but no authoritative Syrian histories. This means there's really nothing to fill this blank spot: why didn't the Syrians keep pushing? The time they spent waiting enabled Israeli reenforcements to enter the field, most notable the stand by Force Zvika along the Tapline.


What I question is whether this is worthwhile. I don't know the specifics of the plan, but any attack on these layered AA defenses is going to cause serious loses. Now, a huge part of Israeli doctrine was built around the capabilities of their powerful and flexible, but finite air force. The sort of loses that this operation entails may not be worth the effort.

Well, they'd have to do it anyway just like they ended up doing later in the war. They lost half a dozen Phantoms taking down the Syrian air defense network, then lost a few more on their final run against the Egyptians.
Needless to say, it was something that was going to need to be done no matter what the losses. The interviews in this book and in others I have seem to show that there was a general belief in the IAF from the command down the pilots that once war came there was a job to be done and it would get done no matter how many planes came back.

But one thing they were doing to cut down on the initial losses, like I said before, was the toss bombing. That enabled them to launch unguided munitions with a minimum of illumination from the SAM sites on the Egyptian side of the canal.


Let's say that somehow the IAF command is able to go with a plan like Sandman pitched: Dougman 5, then Tagar. If they manage to hit even 70 percent of the SAM-2 and SAM-3s and even 10 percent of the SAM-6s, then that's an acceptable lifting of the SAM shield. A-4s can do their missions against ferries and bridges over the Canal while ECM-carrying Wild Weasels hit the remaining missile sites. With no bridges or ferries, the Egyptian divisions in Sinai that were streaming in during the first...say...56 hours before this ATL Operation Tagar are now stranded: without air cover and with only a tenuous ride home if they can swim or if the Egyptian Air Force is willing to try and go toe-to-toe with the IAF.

In one fell swoop, then, the Israelis could've turned 1973 back into 1967. At least in the Sinai.
 
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