The exercises were in one sense unreal. It was clearly impossible in 1968 to attack an enemy superior in everything. So the exercises deliberately presumed that we had far more by way of men and material than the grim reality. That was sensible. Plans and decisions of commanders in the exercises might as a consequence bear little relation to existing conditions; but they would become steadily more relevant as our resources grew.

Our offensive planning for 1973 began, in other words, as early as 1968; but it ran far ahead of our offensive capabilities. Over the next four years our capabilities steadily grew while our planning became more realistic. The gulf between them, enormous in 1968, shrank with each year's exercise until, in October 1973 when exercise became reality, planning and capability were one.

Inevitably though, shortages in those early days did not affect planning. The truth is that when I became Chief of Staff on May 16, 1971, we had no real offensive plan. There was a defensive plan code-named Operation 200 and a more aggressive one called Granite. But although Granite incorporated raids into Sinai, it too fell far short of being a true offensive plan. My task clearly, was to create one.

To outline it briefly, I began my time as Chief of Staff, necessarily with an intensive study of our enemy's forces and capabilities in relation to ours. My conclusions were discouraging. To understand them, it is necessary to examine in turn, as I did, the state of our services.

AIR FORCE: Our weakest arm. In an offensive, we ought to be able to call on it for four tasks. (1) air cover for our ground forces moving through the exposed terrain of Sinai; (2) close-support strikes against enemy targets; (3) rapid and accurate reconnaissance of the enemy's battle formations-a particularly important task in open-country warfare; and finally, the disruption of the enemy's command, communications, supply and  reinforcement patterns by air strikes far into his rear. Our air force could offer us very little.

 Twice, it had been destroyed on the ground: by the British and French in 1956, and by the Israelis in 1967. That had cost us few pilots, but a near-total destruction of morale. At appalling cost in concrete and the labor of our engineers corps, we were now reducing the risk of a repeat debacle by building 500 concrete shelters for our aircraft. On 20 major airfields, all services-operations room, pilots' quarters, hospitals, maintenance-were being buried in concrete warrens underground. And to further deter a surprise attack, most of our main bases were now adequately ringed by SAMs.
 

But in the air our pilots still depended on their own skills and whatever they could coax from their machines; and in their many encounters since 1967 our men had frankly not matched the enemy's. Was the problem lack of skill or inferior aircraft? Our pilots were always blaming the machines; the Soviets blamed our pilots. I saw it as a combination of both.

We had, to start with, fewer pilots than the enemy; those we had were far less experienced. Most of ours had less than 1,000 hours flying time; most of theirs had logged more than 2,000 hours. Our pilots needed intensive training; yet even relatively raw ones had to bear the burden of the War of Attrition. By 1970 pilot exhaustion had pushed training accidents to an alarming rate. We eased off the training pressure. But that merely meant training would take longer.

The enemy had even more in their favor. Air battles tended to be at a time and place of their choosing. Their aircraft would penetrate our air space, our pilots would go up to intercept. But the enemy, we knew, had groomed about 50 crews-the cream of the crop-to fly these penetration raids. Their I combat tactics were prearranged. Our pilots were just the duty roster. Without time to concert plans, they would scramble and be briefed while climbing. (And our air controllers, like any group, were of varying skill: some excellent, others frankly poor.) Small wonder that sometimes our pilots were ambushed in the air or even, in less forgivable instances,, lured into long chases which left them without fuel far from base. Frequently, our pilots would swear they had shot down one or more of the enemy. But, until October 1973, those kills somehow never fell on Egyptian held soil.

Not that our pilots were wholly inaccurate in blaming their equipment. Shortages were not the problem: in 1971 we had more MIG-21s than we could fly. But their short range and limited payload ate into the weaponry and electronics they could carry. The enemy aircraft were more sophisticated, fitted with later air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles and with far heavier electronics. Our pilots, however gallant, faced impossible odds. In effect, the enemy air force was ten years ahead of ours.

AIR DEFENSE: An effective air defense needs four integrated elements: (1) an ability to detect and monitor intruders approaching from a distance; (2) interceptors superior in range, speed and maneuverability; (3) a net work of SAMS; and (4) electronics. The intruders will carry devices to blind the defender's detection gear and disrupt their SAMS and air-to-air missiles. Air defense needs the electronic means to counter that.

Without any one of those elements, an air defense is their vulnerable. Yet to create such a system is enormously expensive, in . both money and skills. I discovered, as Chief of Staff, that half the engineers in Egypt were in the armed forces, most of them working on our air defenses and the associated electronics, although not necessarily manning the equipment. Construction of hundreds of new SAM sites begun as part of the air defense reorganization following the arrival of the Soviets, was well advanced by the end of 1970 but still took 1971 and 1972 to complete.

 By mid-1971, however, as I reviewed our capabilities, our air defense system was dearly on the way to adequacy. The Russians were operating about 30 percent of our MIG-21s, 20 percent of our SAMs and most of the electronics. We, meanwhile, were taking advantage of their help (and the respite from attack their presence assured us) to rebuild and retrain our own air defense corps .And now we were working with better equipment. In the opening phase of the War of Attrition, our SAMs-the type known in the West as SAM-2s-had severe limitations: low altitude intruders evaded them. The SAM-3s the Soviets brought with them in 1970 helped to increase our capabilities

But my conclusion was that, while our air defense system was approaching adequacy, it was mainly defensive. That sounds obvious. My point was that our SAMs were not mobile on trucks or tracked vehicles; their cumbersome radar and electronics were easy prey to enemy air strikes if spotted on the move, anywhere; they were safe only underground. For static defense, they might prove adequate (though we still did not have SAM batteries to protect every target), but they could provide no air cover for an offensive operation, especially over the open landscape of Sinai.

LAND FORCES: We had about 800,000 men under arms. Yet, contrary to persistent international propaganda by the enemy, we had no, real advantage in front line forces. No less than 58 percent of our vast total were not field troops. The main reason for the imbalance was enemy air superiority. We had to anticipate that in a future conflict tactics of the War of Attrition would be repeated and helicopter-borne raids sent deep into Egypt. That posed maximum problems to the defense: hundreds of isolated bridges over the Nile and its tributaries; an intricate and vulnerable irrigation system on which our agriculture depends; water lines spanning hundreds of miles of desert with pumping stations and reservoirs on route; telephone system strung over like distances; petrol lines; plus the usual strategic targets such as railways, roads, electricity plants, government buildings and the like.

        The barest reserves to cover these, plus our Red Sea coastline, consumed hundreds of thousands of men. (Another drain on manpower was the very expansion of the armed forces. Our military schools and training centers were working overtime. Extra officers and men-good ones too-had to be drafted to their staffs.) The upshot was that the ground forces we could actually allot to an assault across the canal would give us no more than parity with the enemy. We did have slight superiority in artillery; but the enemy would be sheltered in the underground fortresses of the Bar-Lev line which, we knew, successive layers of earth and concrete had secured against every shell we possessed. On top of that, the Suez Canal itself, plus the obstacles which the Israelis .had lined upon its banks, presented what most military experts regarded as an impregnable obstacle.

        Once into the desert beyond, our ground forces would face another hazard. Most would have to travel in soft skinned vehicles-trucks rather than armored personnel carriers-and most of those had little or no cross-country capability. 1956 and 1967 had demonstrated that, operating in the desert against an enemy with air superiority, these were a menace. They had to stick to roads or hard tracks. Hit one and not only was the road blocked by that disabled vehicle. All behind would clog into a traffic jam miles long, a serious enough problem even without the inevitable further air strikes.

        NAVY: Our naval arm alone was stronger than the 's But our weakness in the air swamped even them. Our navy had suffered least of the services in 1967; and its morale and standing had been powerfully boosted when, only four months later, it sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat, the vessel used to patrol east of Port Said, on occasion coming within six-and-a-half miles of the port. finally, GHQ authorized a squadron of our Soviet-built KOMAR missile-boats to sink the Eilat next time it violated our 12-mile limit. On October 21, 1967, the Eilat, in its usual patrol, was allowed to approach within nine miles. Then the first sea-to-sea missile (SSM) ever fired combat was launched. A second followed. The Eilat sank rapidly .

 The world's navies had studied the event, none more Israel's. The enemy had concluded that its main al striking power should henceforth be fast-attack boats equipped with SSMs and torpedoes. They bought SAAR class vessels from France, and started to build own RESHEF class in Haifa shipyards at the rate of -two per year. (The first was launched on February 19, 1973.) Simultaneously, they designed an even lighter class, the DABUR Both RESHEF and SAAR carry SSMs made in Israel under the name GABRIEL. The RESHEF class, 415 tons, carries seven GABRIELS, has a range of 1,500 miles, a top speed of 32 knots and a crew of 45. The DABUR by contrast, is only 35 tons with a crew of six. It can mount torpedo tubes or machineguns; and a tank transporter can carry it overland from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. (We reckoned the enemy had built 20 of the DABUR type before the October war.)

Despite this change of emphasis, the Israelis appreciated that their navy could still not challenge ours without the support of air power. Through the War of Attrition their response, a logical one, was to unleash their air force against our navy. The enemy would cruise the Gulf of Suez raiding our shipping, while our vessels, far heavier, were unable to challenge without calling upon themselves devastating air strikes. Even in port our navy was vulnerable. Our limited air defenses were allotted to our forces along the Suez front, and to the protection of our major cities and factories. Our Red Sea naval berths were naked to enemy strikes.

Small wonder that our navy, far stronger than the enemy's was all but neutralized. Nor is it surprising that since 1967 GHQ should have abandoned the idea of developing and modernizing our navy until we could provide air cover for it.

On those bleak considerations, I reached my first conclusion as Chief of Staff. It was impossible for us to launch a large-scale offensive to destroy the enemy concentrations in Sinai or to force enemy withdrawal from Sinai and the Gaza Strip. All that our capabilities would permit was a limited attack. We could aim to cross the Canal, destroy the Bar-Lev line and then take up a defensive posture. Any further, more aggressive moves would then need different equipment, different training, and a lot, more preparation.

Four main factors drove me to that conclusion. The first was the weakness of our air force-a weakness so fundamental that, throughout my planning, I was anxious not to bring our air force into direct conflict with the enemy's. From the start, I adopted two main principles. First, to avoid chance air encounters. Second, to use our air force for sudden ground-attack strikes where enemy air cover was least likely. Primarily, I wanted the enemy's ground forces and ground targets to taste the psychological impact of our air force, while at the same time I wanted to preserve it from air combat. I was convinced at unless we deployed the air force in a cautious and calculated way, we would merely lose it for the third me, this time in the air.

 The second factor leading me to conclude that only a limited operation was possible was the offensive limitations of our SAMs. In the later stages of the War of Attrition, our SAM emplacements had proven their effectiveness. Israeli pilots had been at pains to avoid them. Where they had passed within range, our SAMs had destroyed them. I was convinced that, even to repel our assault, the enemy pilots would still be cautious in braving the SAMs-and that when they did, we could exact a price. The point we could not forget was that our SAMs were static.
 

From 1956 and 1967 we had bitter knowledge of how around troops exposed without effective air cover could be routed. From the War of Attrition, by contrast, we had learned how ineffective air attacks were against well-entrenched troops. Logically, any advance by our troops east of the Canal would need the support of an air defense based on SAMs. With enough preparation, my judgment was that we could cross the Canal and advance east some six to eight miles while remaining under the SAM umbrella which we could deploy right on the west bank of the Canal in quickly prepared field sites during the course of the battle. But at that line we would have to halt, entrench our troops and reorganize our air defense. To send ground forces rolling beyond that, without mobile SAMs to give advancing air cover, would be to court disaster.

The third factor in my calculations was the need to force the enemy to fight under unfavorable conditions. Israel, with its three million inhabitants, mobilizes in time of war more than a fifth of its population. It cannot sustain that for long without damaging its economy and crippling its service industries. The Israelis in consequence, have always had two priorities. The first has been to avoid casualties. Loss of equipment, however sophisticated or costly, leaves them unmoved; their backers have always hastened to supply more. But the loss of a single soldier wounds them. Their second priority is to fight a blitzkrieg campaign; a conflict prolonged for having months is anathema to them. It followed that if crossed the canal, we could consolidate our positions six to eight miles to the east, perhaps slightly more, we could compel the harshest of choices. The enemy would have to assault our positions, giving us the chance to inflict heavy losses on them from air and ground attack. We could prolong the conflict at will, at minimum cost to ourselves.

My fourth and final factor was the simplest. To learn war, fight war. I had been in five wars and I was convinced that no peace-time exercise, however realistic, generates in troops the psychological effects of war: that blend of terror and courage, caution and gallant recklessness which fuels soldiers on the battlefield. To train our officers and men for the big war that had to come, we needed first a small war, a limited operation to give the battle experience most of our soldiers lacked. Moreover, there was a good chance such an operation could succeed; and that would go a long way to restoring the morale of armed forces beaten three times in less than 25 years. That reason alone seemed to me to dictate that our first operation should be a calculated risk rather than a quixotic gamble.