Soldier in the Sinai

A General's Account of the Yom Kippur War

Emanuel Sakal, Moshe Tlamim

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813150802
• eBook ISBN: 9780813150826
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

1

Development of the Defense Concept in Western Sinai

The concept of defense in Western Sinai developed according to circumstance and need. It began with routine operational drills when fighting resumed on the Suez Canal in July 1967 and evolved as Egyptian hostilities intensified and the number of Israeli casualties climbed.

The War of Attrition and the construction of the defensive line (strongholds) on the banks of the canal were a turning point in the IDF’s war-fighting concept. As military and political circumstances changed and troop deployments shifted, that concept transformed from a classic offensive doctrine to a predominantly static, defensive one. Short- and long-range raids into Egypt and deep-penetration air strikes forced the Egyptians to establish an air defense layout that severely hampered Israeli air activity by the end of the War of Attrition.

The cease-fire (August 8, 1970, to October 6, 1973) dulled the Israeli planners’ senses with regard to the nature of the next war with Egypt. Would it be solely defensive and static, or would the IDF have to cross the canal to the western shore at the outset or conclusion of a short, decisive defensive battle? During these years, the Bar-Lev Line deteriorated, but no alternative defense plan was prepared.

Because the nature of any future military confrontation remained unknown, the IDF would have to be ready for a wide range of scenarios: from local raids on the strongholds to battles like those in a war of attrition; from a limited Egyptian thrust to gain a foothold on the eastern bank to full-scale war. The scope of the next war was the subject of debate. Some planners foresaw a very limited Egyptian move—seizing the eastern shore and capturing the Bar-Lev Line. Others thought the Egyptians would try to retake Western Sinai up to the mountain passes, and some weighed the possibility of an Egyptian attempt to recapture the entire Sinai Peninsula. There was consensus on the need to maintain a military presence on the canal to implement the government’s unwritten directive of no territorial gains for Egypt, but the planners disagreed over the optimal way to safeguard the canal: mobile or static defense. The complex, often acrimonious debate continued until war erupted. Lacking a clearly defined defensive battle plan, the military was left with a vague directive—the regulars will hold—that failed to address the key question: how to fight a defensive battle with limited air support in the event of a surprise attack.

The Dovecote plan—the deployment of regulars on the canal in the event of a renewal of hostilities—assumed that these troops would be able to block an all-out assault until reinforcing divisions arrived. According to the Rock (in Hebrew, Sela) plan, these divisions would counterattack and transfer the fighting to the western bank. Dovecote was ill-defined, however, and this ambiguity would have far-reaching consequences in the first days of the war, when 252nd Division was thrown headlong into furious combat and given impossible tasks. In the opening days of the war, the Egyptians fought according to an organized doctrine based on their study of IDF behavior and operational solutions for clearly defined missions. They adapted the Soviet war-fighting doctrine to the IDF’s pattern of ground fighting and succeeded in neutralizing its acknowledged advantage in armor and airpower.

Defense and Offense in Israel’s Security Concept

For several years, discussion of defense-related issues in GHQ had been inadequate and generally accompanied by a depreciatory attitude, although it was evident that an in-depth discussion was required at the national level. For years, Israel had prepared for the next war, which, according to the pattern of the Arab-Israeli conflict, would be fought on the cease-fire lines of the last war.

At the end of the War of Independence and in the early 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, laid down the basic principles of Israel’s defense strategy and security concept:

1. Each war is a war of survival.

2. Since an unconditional victory is unattainable, the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be solved by military means alone.

3. An Arab victory means the end of the conflict.

4. Israel cannot rely on overseas support. Security must be based on the IDF’s strength.

5. The IDF will be employed only for strategic defensive goals to secure the status quo attained at the end of the War of Independence.

6. On a practical level, the following principles are self-evident:

• Israel lacks a natural strategic depth; therefore, it has to create an artificial one by carrying the war onto the enemy’s territory.

• Israel’s limited resources preclude it from maintaining a large standing army; therefore, it has to base its defense on a small force of regulars led by a professional career core and backed by a well-trained reserve framework.

• The fighting theater does not allow Israel to engage in a prolonged war or wait for foreign assistance. Thus, the war must be quick and decisive. Since an unconditional victory is impossible and the attainment of political objectives is possible only in war, Israel must aspire to destroy the enemy outright, terminate the fighting in conditions convenient for it, and stave off the next war for as long as possible.¹

In general, these were the directives that shaped the IDF into an offensive army whose defensive outlook was unsatisfactory and shallow at the strategic level and especially at the applied and doctrinal levels (weapons, training, commander instruction, war-fighting doctrine, and so on).

Thus, doctrinal ignorance and a devaluation of the defensive battle (partly because of the proven success of the offensive battle until after the Six-Day War) characterized the IDF for years. This attitude was revealed in all its shortcomings—both in wartime and during periods of relative quiet—in drills and exercises at all levels. The attack was considered the key to military thinking, as expressed in joint operations at the GHQ level and in ground combat team training.

The IDF’s attempts to convince formations and training bases to incorporate defensive exercises into their units’ drills and training schedules came to naught. The defensive stage, if included at all, was usually abridged or glossed over, and the lessons that should have been learned were squandered. The offensive battle (especially the breakthrough stage) dominated IDF exercises. The disparaging mind-set toward the defensive battle was echoed in statements by researchers, senior IDF commanders, and the defense establishment.

Planning a defensive battle at the operational and tactical level is an extremely complex task that involves innumerable details: defining the modus operandi of mobile and stationary forces (including territorial defense forces, when possible); creating fire plans for warplanes, helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks, precision-guided munitions (after 1973), and antitank weapons within and beyond the killing grounds; identifying vital areas; planning and marking withdrawal lines, holding lines, and the rear defensive line; setting up obstacles integrated with canalizing and destructive fire; constructing fortifications in vital areas, open areas, and dominating areas; planning the local and main counterattack with fire support; collecting intelligence; logistics; and so forth. Such defensive planning calls for a commander with a highly developed operational imagination and superlative professional control of available forces. It entails advanced training, planning for both deliberate and hasty battle procedures, and preparatory drills for headquarters and troops, all of which the IDF lacked at noon on October 6, 1973.

Only Offense Can Win Wars

Several Israeli military leaders have stated their preference for the offense. Moshe Dayan, chief of staff during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, wrote that an artificial strategic depth (consisting of obstacles and regional defense) and defensive measures can succeed only in delaying the enemy; they cannot provide vital infrastructure with sufficient defense. Thus, the offensive is the only form of combat that wins wars. In Israel’s case, the enemy cannot be defeated unless the IDF initiates an offensive and captures strategic objectives in the enemy’s territorial depth.

Major General Israel Tal, deputy chief of staff in 1973, stated that the defending side cannot put up an effective defense under quantitatively inferior conditions because its theoretical advantage is eroded as a result of the need to divide its forces.

In reference to the Sinai Campaign, Major General Meir Amit (Ret.) wrote: “We knew that the IDF did not excel in defense. We trained solely for a mobile war and transfer of the fighting onto the enemy’s territory. Only offensive moves can undermine the enemy, seize the initiative, and throw him off-balance.”²

Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff during the Six-Day War, also endorsed the offensive, avowing that a defensive battle stymies a quick victory. In addition, it was unsuited to the IDF’s frequent need to fight on a number of fronts simultaneously and achieve a swift operational decision on one front in order to concentrate its forces on the others. “The defensive concept impairs the fighting force, leads to cognitive stultification, and further erodes the IDF’s relative advantage in initiated, improvised, mobile combat,” noted Rabin.³

It should be mentioned that after the War of Independence, both Dayan and Rabin led the IDF in successful offensive campaigns from borders that were incapable of withstanding a concerted enemy attack. Given the constraints of Israel’s borders, the security concept formulated by Ben-Gurion after the War of Independence had to be applied: a national defensive strategy and offensive doctrine that transferred the fighting at the operational level to the enemy’s territory.

The “Attack Reflex”

If Dayan’s and Rabin’s statements seem tailor-made for the realities of 1956 and 1967, the views of Lieutenant General David “Dado” Elazar just prior to the Yom Kippur War are disconcerting: “to win we have to attack—and the faster we attack, the better.”⁴

The claim that the defensive battle saps improvisation and stifles creative thinking and fighting capability is nothing new and was certainly not unique to the IDF. Other armies, too, have been hard-pressed to find the optimal balance between defense and offense. Regarding the ethos of the offensive in Europe, renowned British strategist and historian Liddell Hart believed that whereas armies tend to see the attack as a panacea, the sands of history are strewn with the debris of kingdoms that embarked on the offensive.

In Israel’s case, the security concept had to take into account the enormous quantitative gap between the IDF and Arab forces. Yet fixation on the attack and the ethos of the offense led the IDF to execute some rash and reckless operations: the ill-prepared counterattack in Sinai on October 8; the overhasty plan for crossing the canal; 143rd Division’s movement on the western bank in the direction of Ismailia; and entry of 500th Brigade, 162nd Division, into the city of Suez on October 24. The cult of the offensive spawned the conditioned reflex to attack. Major General Avraham Adan admitted, “We were slaves to the doctrine we’d been reared on that an attack had to be carried out as soon as possible and the war transferred to the enemy.”⁵

A survey of the main engagements in Sinai shows that the IDF’s defensive battles succeeded and saved lives in both relative and absolute terms. This occurred after the defensive line stabilized on October 9 and the IDF internalized, at least in part, the errors of the first three days of the fighting. The outstanding example is the breaking of the Egyptian offensive on October 14, which caused heavy damage to the enemy. The Egyptians’ loss of 200 to 250 tanks and the overall failure of their offensive marked the turning point in the war in Sinai. Behind these Israeli achievements lies the fact that the IDF entered the war unversed in modern defensive combat; it had not studied the application of defensive principles since 1948, including the use of airpower for defense. This lack of experience led to misjudgment in terms of the balance of forces needed to withstand a surprise attack and miscalculations in the size of regular units, number of formations, and amount of time needed to hold the line until the reserves arrived.

Why did the IDF decide to forgo a defensive battle? Given the numerical imbalance of forces, it chose to base its doctrine on the offensives of 1956 and 1967, especially in light of its limited ability to fight defensively. Even when defensive deployment against a full-scale Arab offensive was discussed, it was perceived not as a strategic option but as a short-term tactical answer—a preliminary stage to the immediate follow-up of the main attack. As Generals Gonen and Hofi, commanders of the two regional commands, stated in their testimony to the Agranat Commission, the attack was the quintessence of IDF strategy.

Major General Yeshayahu Gavish (Ret.) admitted that the IDF never considered how to set up a defense: “This was a serious oversight on the eve of the Six-Day War when we realized that fortifications and a defense system were lacking. There was no defensive concept because we never thought in strategic terms about how to protect the state.”⁶

Chief of Staff Elazar stated his unequivocal position on defensive combat in April 1973: “I don’t intend to discuss the concept of standing defensively on the canal and fighting a defensive war. I don’t suffer from this trauma and I don’t want a defensive war on the canal. I believe it would be a disaster.”⁷ Given the chief of staff’s definitive attitude, it is little wonder that the entire army rallied around the offensive, abandoned and scorned the defensive battle, and invested neither time nor energy in devising tactics to engage in it.

A month later, Elazar presented his plans to the prime minister and emphasized his intention to avoid a defensive war and launch a counteroffensive on the canal in the event of a surprise attack. Of course, this position, which was adopted by the IDF’s senior command, was decisive in shaping the army’s war-fighting plans. Offensive plans were thoroughly prepared, but plans for a defensive battle were given short shrift, and the defensive elements constructed in the depths were insignificant. As a result, many units and commanders were insufficiently trained and psychologically ill prepared to fight a defensive battle. In reality, Southern Command’s fear that the main line would collapse and its knowledge that there was no second line of defense to fall back on had a powerful impact on the command’s thinking in the initial stages of the holding battles.⁸

In principle, the IDF combat doctrine assumed a balanced approach to battle, but in practice, more resources were always allocated to the offensive battle. A careful look at the 1973 training schedule reveals that of the twenty-eight main lessons planned for 252nd and 143rd Divisions, only one dealt with defense; for 146th and 210th Divisions’ training exercises, not a single defensive lesson was planned. Brigade exercises included one lesson in organizing a hasty defense (but this allotted time was usually frittered away).

The Role of the Reserves

After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the IDF realized that an offensive move depended on mobilization of the reserves. In the wake of the Six-Day War, when Israel acquired the strategic depth of Sinai, the question arose whether an urgent call-up of reserves was necessary in the event of an alert. At the time of the “Blue White” alert in Sinai in April–May 1973, only one reserve brigade was mobilized.

This was the backdrop to the debate between Chief of Staff Elazar and Defense Minister Dayan on the morning of October 6, 1973, which revealed the basic divide between the military sphere and the political sphere: the chief of staff urged a general call-up of reservists, but the defense minister wanted to limit mobilization of the reserves to the minimum needed for the regulars to fight a defensive battle. The chief of staff and the defense minister saw eye to eye on the role of the reservists—for attack, not for defense. However, they ignored the fact that the reserves were essentially a militia, not a rapid-response force. In addition, their supply units were located far from the canal, posing serious logistical problems, especially in the event of a surprise attack. Failure to recognize the reservists’ limitations, failure to acknowledge their part in the IDF’s defense structure, and ignoring (even at the most basic level of planning) the likelihood of a surprise attack were fatal mistakes.⁹

Crystallization of the Defense Doctrine in Sinai

At the end of the Six-Day War, the IDF deployed on advantageous defensive lines far from the international border and Israel’s population centers, but the security concept that canonized the offensive battle (the result of the dazzling six-day victory) remained inflexibl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Development of the Defense Concept in Western Sinai
• 2. Initial Blunders
• 3. Ground Forces in the Defensive Battle
• 4. Air Support for the Ground Forces
• 5. The Preemptive Strike that Wasn’t
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index